Someone, unknown to me, has posted a photo of mine, likely downloaded from another site. They have included incorrect date and location data for their post, and did not have my permission to use my photo. It’s very clearly the same photo as one that I took. Several of the comments have mentioned the unusual location for the species. What are my options for dealing with such a situation on iNaturalist? Thanks.
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Click flag for copyright.
(Then also date and location incorrect)
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Flag it for copyright infringement. When viewing the observation, there’s a set of three icons over the photo. The middle one is a flag; click that, then select “Copyright Infringement”.
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This seems to keep happening on iNat. I stumbled upon this behavior more often than expected.
I was wondering why people would do this (aside from the occasional kiddo who didn’t get how iNat works yet). Do you think some of those people are predators? Or is there a comprehension issue for adults to keep posting stuff that isn’t theirs? I don’t see what is to be gained by posting other persons pics as your own.
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I suspect the reasons are either
A) They don’t understand what iNat is and just posted the picture because they liked it or because they want to know what it is (as people do all the time on sites like Facebook)
B) They’re a student being forced to use iNat for a class so they’re deliberately cheating by uploading pictures they found somewhere on the internet
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In birding Facebook groups, it’s uncommon but fairly routine that people will post a picture that they got on the Internet which shows a bird which they are sure looks like the bird they saw.
Often, when you ask them about this, they are very confused about why that’s unhelpful and inappropriate.
I have seen this behavior often enough that it doesn’t surprise me anymore. The idea that you need to include your photos of that specific thing you observed is just not intuitively obvious to everyone. Maybe they saw other people posting photos and assumed that those other people were also posting photos they found on the Internet somewhere.
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This. I’ve even seen a university professor post a photo from the internet to illustrate an iNat observation of a species he’d seen, which (not being a photographer) he didn’t have a photo of. He wasn’t trying to pass it off as his own photo, and it wasn’t obvious to him that there was anything wrong with this.
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The idea that everything on the Internet is free for anyone to use for anything is also still surprisingly common.
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I guess, like many things in life, it comes down to an understanding of PURPOSE.
What is the PURPOSE of this website called iNaturalist?
They think the PURPOSE is to ID what they saw. It doesn’t occur to them that the PURPOSE could be to engage with nature, and to generate data about global biodiversity, based on personal observations.
To be fair, the ACTUAL purpose of iNaturalist would not be most people’s first guess. It might not even be their fifth guess!
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My favorite instance of this behavior: I recently saw somebody submit the iNaturalist taxon photo for the species as their own photo (it was not).
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Yeah, a lot of people using the app don’t realize that iNat observations are automatically used as biodiversity data points, and quite possibly they wouldn’t even know what that means if they were informed of it.
I assume the process is that they hear about iNat as an app that uses AI to identify organisms, and test it with their own or someone else’s photos, not caring about the accuracy of date or location or anything (and if it was like Seek or ChatGPT or Google Lens or any other identification AI, that would be the normal way to use it!). Maybe some of them don’t even realize it’s being posted publicly for other people to see. Or if they do, they assume it’s like facebook where the post is never used for anything else after the initial discussion.
For those of us who’ve been using it for years and gotten used to the way things work…
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Thanks, guys, those are all possibilities I did not think of.
Maybe it is because of some details of this specific case. Inventing time and place of the observation, being contacted about it, still not reacting … sounds rather sinister to me.
Maybe being a father has made me a little overcautious (to avoid saying “paranoid”).
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Thank you! That’s exactly the information I was seeking. Done!
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“Inventing” a time and place makes sense if the person is using the photo to represent something they saw.
Or depending on what method they used to copy the photo, iNat’s photo uploader may be using the metadata from the file they submitted (date/location of when they saved or took a screen shot of the photo).
Not reacting to comments/messages is not uncommon for new users who don’t realize that they get notifications or should look at them. And I believe users of the old iOS app get very limited notifications.
So it might be intentional misuse, or it might not. Flagging for copyright infringement is the right action in either case.
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Two relevant FAQs:
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169928
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Caleb,
Our conversation reminds me of this post, which I am sharing because we have a lot of new members who may not have seen it:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/open-letter-of-apology-for-once-being-a-reckless-user/26346
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Wow I’d completely forgotten that post, although apparently I liked it in the past haha. It’s rare to get such a detailed explanation like that! She’s clearly a very considerate person, and somehow accidentally ended up acting inconsiderate. I don’t think she should take all the blame. Although personally I would research an app more before using it, I guess you can’t expect most people to do that. Whatever onboarding she went through when loading up the app, evidently wasn’t clear enough.
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Reminds me of when I was on the records committee for the Iowa Ornithologists Union, decades ago. We mostly worked with verbal descriptions. Sometimes that descriptions was, “It looked just like the picture in the book!” perhaps with the book name and page number included. They often couldn’t understand why they were being asked to describe the bird when the drawing in the book did a much better job of communicating what the species looks like. Sigh.
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Yes, those are all perfectly reasonable possibilities.
Thanks for pointing them out!
This scenario is slightly different. Copyright rules have exception that is called Fair use exception. You can check out the details online. One of the purposes allowed are ‘comment’, and the other is ‘educational’.
The formal way to do it is to include the copyright holder’s name to the picture and seek permission for use. I think people might skip this at times in an informal setting. There are also different status to pictures, such as public domain, some rights reserved, and all rights reserved.