I work with wildlife professionally and often have indirect observations where I’m assisting with an animal but am not the person who is directly eye-to-eye with that animal. One example: a member of the general public submits a photo of a grey fox with severe sarcoptic mange, and asks for advice c…

Generally no, we don’t want you to do that. We assume everything you upload is your own work and that you hold the copyright for the media you upload. Unfortunately, you’ll find many such instances on iNat, which we grudgingly tolerate, but we’d prefer you not do that.

What about creating an account specifically for that kind of use? With mentioning authors and their rights for observations. But sure it’s better to have them all log in iNat, it’s not hard to do through facebook for example, less work than other websites ask.

[image] marina_gorbunova: What about creating an account specifically for that kind of use? Again, we tolerate it, but we don’t like it because it forces us to misrepresent the attribution, e.g. you make an account with a name “Other People’s Photos” and the photos will be displayed as “(c) O…

If the photos were CC0, wouldn’t it kinda-sorta solve that problem since then the attribution is effectively irrelevant? :)

From the user guide, it is partially, but not only a copyright issue. ‘Photos attached to observations should include evidence of the actual organism at the time of the observation, observed by the user who is uploading the observation’. The site has long been clear they do not want to be a general…

[image] cmcheatle: ‘Photos attached to observations should include evidence of the actual organism at the time of the observation, observed by the user who is uploading the observation’. The site has long been clear they do not want to be a general data aggregator, there are other places that do…

Using a photo taken by someone else with their permission and properly credited to document something you personally observed is permitted. As long as it represents your experience viewing the organism. For example there are multiple photos in my observations showing a hand holding a dragonfly. It i…

[image] reosarevok: If the photos were CC0, wouldn’t it kinda-sorta solve that problem since then the attribution is effectively irrelevant? :) Sort of. I still don’t like it b/c even though the attribution is irrelevant, it’s also inaccurate. Furthermore, my issue isn’t just with ownership o…

[image] kueda: I should also say that the idea of trying to make occurrence data from arbitrary images on the web is an idea I find interesting (machine-assisted crowdsourced aggregation, de-duping, identification, etc.), it’s just not what I think iNat should be used for. the ‘problem’ is yo…

Hmm. I have added a handful of observations taken by my husband, who travels a lot for work. On each, I note that he took it not me, but maybe I should remove these altogether. Or make a separate account for him to use.

Indirect observations/ submitting observations made by general public

General

charlie December 23, 2019, 9:02pm 14

there are many married couples who share accounts, I don’t think it’s a problem. My wife just says there’s no point in her using iNat because I’ll get anything before her anyway :)

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Indirect observations/ submitting observations made by general public

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