but that is still not acceptable to iNat’s guidelines.
That is not your engagement with that biodiversity.
2 Likes
I think about it again, Yes, that might not be optimum to post in iNat a replacement picture because the community can’t verify the observation. It can log an observation to the database but we can’t verify it. It will be based on trust. There may be instances in which a representative picture of a species are posted in iNat. That picture could belong to the copyright holder, so there is no copyright issue and yet it doesn’t look like in a natural environment.
The problem with people posting photos that are not their own because they think it looks like what they saw is not exclusively about copyright – the problem is that the individual organism in the photograph is not the individual that they saw. The media attached to an observation is provided as evidence of a particular organism at a particular place and time. If the evidence represents something else, the record is false.
It is like submitting someone else’s receipt as evidence that you purchased a product – even it is the same product, all the receipt proves is that the product exists and someone purchased it, not that you purchased it.
9 Likes
In this case it was just a case of someone not understanding how iNaturalist works. If I observe an animal and want to record it on iNat, but don’t have a photo, I can’t just take a photo from the internet to illustrate my observation. It might be ok if iNaturalist was nothing more than a personal log of sightings, in which case the random photo would be akin to putting something in your scrapbook. But given that observations are also used for science, photos need to represent the actual organism seen by the observer. Fair use doesn’t apply to a case like this.
5 Likes
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