iNaturalist data on GBIF shows only CC BY-NC (excluding CC0 and CC BY)

General
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As @kcopas said, GBIF requires us to choose a license for the dataset as a whole, and thus we choose the most conservative license among those allowed in the dataset. As Kyle mentioned, this is the same approach GBIF adopts when applying a license to a dataset of mixed-license content, and it seems like a reasonable approach to me. It does not change the license of the individual records, it just declares a license for the collection of records itself. The records within the dataset retain their original license declarations, so consumers can perform any additional filtering after they’ve obtained the data, assuming they care, and I doubt that they do, because most observation content (minus the photo and the description) is not subject to copyright since it’s not creative, authored work, and most consumers are not republishing it.

@kcopas, what I don’t understand is why GBIF seems to index individual occurrence records with the license of their dataset, and not the license of the individual record, even though you are ingesting that data. In @andrawaag’s original screenshot at the top of this thread of the license facet in GBIF’s occurrence search, and in the “Occurrences Per License” portion of the Metrics, it seems to be lumping all iNat records under the dataset license instead of the individual licenses. Is this a bug on GBIF’s end?

It’s doable, but

  1. It would make tracking stats about how iNat records get used on GBIF more difficult (we would have to check 3 datasets instead of 1), including creating links from iNat observations to GBIF occurrences and things like the Year In Review citation chart
  2. The archives would take longer to produce, as there’s reasonable overhead involved in every export process, a process that already takes several days on our end

We only apply a single license to the dataset as a whole because GBIF asked us to. If they are not allowing search and filtering based on occurrence-level licenses, that seems like an issue they should fix, since it presumably affects data from all of GBIF’s data providers. Assuming that’s not something GBIF will change, would publishing single-license archives even address this, @kcopas?

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