Very sad to find out this from a channel I really like. They could have very easily picked CC-BY pictures and put the source author. This is pure laziness (And/or lack of caring) on the editor’s side.
I will wait a couple of days to send them an email, so that they see continued push about this instead of a single wave of complaints.
Hmm, interesting, I thought everything in inaturalist was automatically public domain? Since it’s public information that we all are meant to benefit from.
it’s definitely not all public domain. each individual user can choose their photo licensing, either across all observations or even on a single observation. in fact, if you are an iNaturalist user, you either had to choose a licensing setting upon registration or have always had the option to change it in your settings. in all cases, if referencing another person’s observation(s), it’s critical to check the licensing of a photo or associated data for compliance reasons.
an aside: one of my peeves as a researcher are the new users who go straight to “all rights reserved”, the strictest level of license, where their records cannot be shared to any external database – makes it impossible to use them in bulk (e.g. downloading from GBIF) and usually it’s just not feasible to go through and ask a bunch of people, the vast majority of whom are inactive or don’t respond to questions, for their permission to use a record in a study that might not even get published anytime soon. I’m sure there are good reasons for individual someones to choose this option, but in most of these cases people just don’t understand that it means that their data will never be usable en masse even for scientific or educational purposes, and choose it with an incomplete understanding of the issue. I have never asked someone to change their licensing setting but the lack of knowledge around it has been a bother to me professionally.
anyway, in this reptiles Youtube channel case – even if everything were made to be public domain, “© iNaturalist” would be incorrect attribution regardless…
Your observation, photos, and sounds all have a copyright license. By default, they’re all CC-By-NC, which means you can use the source if you name the person who made it and you don’t make money. The fact that observations have a license is particularly important because it means that, yes, even the DATA on iNat isn’t public information. You can change it to be something different; most of my observations, photos, and sounds are CC0 (there are some with a different license if I didn’t feel like the data or media belonged to solely me) which does mean public domain.
The original thread chalked Clint’s misuse of CC-BY-NC up to both mistaking the default license to be CC-BY without the NC and thought they could use it to make money, and that they thought BY was iNaturalist instead of the photographer. The problem now is that it’s been pointed out directly to them that they were mistaken, yet they continued to do it, which means they don’t care, were never mistaken, or they somehow haven’t seen any of the comments or emails related to the issue.
This misuse of photos is not only wrong, it is illegal. Someone involved can and probably should contact Clint’s Reptiles by mail and threaten to contact his/her/their attorney if Clint’s Reptiles doesn’t either take the films down or give proper attribution for the photos. And follow through if Clint’s Reptiles doesn’t respond. (I know most of us don’t have easy access to legal help, but some of us probably do.) If the people behind these films would just put a little more effort into selecting appropriate photos, they could avoid the problem.
Another topic was created about the same subject, so I merged those posts to the older one here.
Several things get easily conflated in this matter, but they are really different things: authorship is not ownership.
Even public domain stuff (= no ownership strings attached) retains an author; misrepresenting authorship is still ethically dubious (at best), or plain misconduct - especially in things science-related (issues of plagiarism, traceability, etc.).
Anyway, let’s just download all this Youtuber’s videos (they are publicly available!) and host them somewhere else for free unlimited access with no ads, acknowledging “Youtube” as the author. I’m sure they won’t mind :)
I imagine most users who choose “all rights reserved” are not aware that this limits the use of their data. Unless one happens to work in either academia or media/publishing (and often even if one does) the implications of copyright notices and creative commons licensing are not obvious. If they did not take the time to read the explanation of the license choices, they probably believe that “all rights reserved” is a way to ensure that they are credited/maintain control over their content.
The fact that photos can be licensed separately from the observation data or what this means is also likely not obvious to everyone.
This is utterly myopic. Yeah im just gonna collect a bunch of biological useful data and then not share it and not allow people to use it because…reasons? How selfish, frankly. What do they benefit from it?
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or sarcastic, since your own images on iNaturalist are marked as “all rights reserved” and thus cannot be shared or reused anywhere else. Personally, I would love if my images were used in videos on YouTube, without or without attribution, which is why I license my images as CC0, which is essentially public domain. I hope that you’ll consider relicensing your own images if you do want them to be shared.
(I took too long to write this reply and this has already been pointed out, but:)
Most people on iNat probably don’t know that they’re doing that—like you. All your observations are “all rights reserved” right now.
People who create a new account are shown this checkbox (at least this is how it looks on the web version):
If you leave it checked, your observations and photos will be CC-BY-NC. This lets them go to GBIF.
If you leave it unchecked, they stay “all rights reserved,” so no one can use them without your permission. Except, of course, iNaturalist itself, as described in the Terms of Use (paragraph starting with “By submitting Content to iNaturalist for inclusion on the Platform, You grant iNaturalist …”)
Neither of those two options let your photos be used on Wikipedia, or in YouTube videos (see above in the thread). Based on what you’ve said above, you probably want to change the license you use. In the web version, your options for default licenses are in Account Settings > Content & Display > Licensing. There are checkboxes to also change the licenses on all the stuff you’ve already uploaded.
For extra confusion, there are separate options for observations, photos, and sounds. If you change the license only on your observations, that doesn’t let people use your photos.
Further reading:
Try looking at it the other way: what is the harm in making your media and data public domain or otherwise less restricted? One of the major downsides is that you no longer get to decide what your media and data is used for. Obviously, right? But what bad could come from that?
I don’t know anything about Clint’s Reptiles, but, hypothetically, let’s say this channel has captive box turtles in outdoor enclosures. There’s a bit of a debate among turtle owners about whether or not it’s ethical to bury your turtles for the winter, with some people saying they absolutely need to hibernate naturally and others saying that helping them hibernate prevents unnecessary fatalities. Imagine that you’re against burying your turtles. You think it’s inhumane and should qualify as animal abuse (for the record, I don’t know enough about turtles to have an opinion on this matter. It’s all hypothetical). You also happen to have your photos set to All Rights Reserved, completely intentionally. Clint’s Reptiles in this scenario is a strong advocate for burying turtles. Legally, they cannot use your photos to advocate for turtle burying without your explicit permission, which is great because it means they will NEVER use your photo to advocate burying your turtles. But they did. and now, you have an entire legal case against them. You can get reimbursed for the illegal use of your photo and you also get the added benefit of painting them in a bad light, which is good because that also puts burying turtles in a bad light. If those photos were set to CC0, then you wouldn’t have a case and you would indirectly be supporting turtle burying, maybe even without your knowledge. Even if you did find out, you couldn’t really do anything about it; you expanded the turtle-burying cause.
This can go for data, too. Imagine there’s a swampy area that used to have thousands of frogs maybe 100 years ago. Now, frogs are hard to find in that area, and a lot of sources point to climate change as the cause. You found a frog there and published it to iNaturalist. It’s great news for a recent habitat restoration project nearby and they want to use your data point in their article. It’s much easier for them to use it if they don’t even need to ask you for permission, and, for some articles, having to ask for permission might even be the cause of the article being shot down. Now let’s say there’s another group. They say the frogs left because of climate change, right? That means, if there’s frogs there, climate change must not be real. Your data point also looks great in this article. If your observation is set to CC0, your observation easily goes to both articles, without your knowledge or permission. If it’s set to All Rights Reserved, it (legally) doesn’t make it to the climate denier article because you wouldn’t let them use it.
since others have made the points in a follow-up reply that I would want to make, let me just say how much I appreciate everyone who does choose CC0 (you make my frantic presentation-assembling as a PhD student so much easier!) or CC-BY / CC-BY-NC (how nice to just provide credit where credit is due and know that all is well!). obviously there is, as in this reptiles channel case, the occasional bad-faith — or perhaps stupid-faith — misattribution. but I can only speak for my fellow overworked students who are grateful to be beneficiaries of Creative Commons photo licensing.
my vanity compels me to choose CC-BY as my own preferred observation and photo license, but I hope anyone who isn’t an asset-thieving Youtuber can get useful data from my records with only that single string attached.
While the observational data might be a legally tricky area when it comes to copyright and ownership (in the US at least, it can be considered “factual data”, which sort of transcends copyright), images, such as photographs, are pretty clear-cut and copyrightable.
If you do not have permission to use a licensed image, you shouldn’t use it. You especially shouldn’t profit from it. I won’t belabor the “moral arguments” of copyright infringement in a vacuum as it’s not the time or the place, but I feel like it’s uncontroversial to say that making money from art you do not have permission to make money from is bad, actually.
Some of the responses in here are pretty disappointing to see. :(
I was referring to occurence data here, not images
Again, your observations (the data) are “all rights reserved.”
In that thread I linked above, several said that the observation itself (“I saw this bug in this location at this time”) probably isn’t even copyrightable, unless you write a novel in the description. Nonetheless, iNat makes you choose a license for observations the same way it does for photos and sounds, and doesn’t send their data to GBIF unless you pick one of the options GBIF takes.
I also just got the same email! Yay! We finally got their attention! Thanks everyone!
This is honestly a large issue, i think many people unknowingly have all rights reserved. Also still very confused with your comments as they still contradict your current copyright settings. You currently are not sharing any of your inat data due to copyright. Though this is becoming a bit of a tangent. Wouldnt be surprised if movwd by mod if there even is a copyright discussion post.
Glad to hear that they’re working on it!
I always figured this was probably an oversight and not intentional maliciousness.
