Hi,
what would be the protocol here?
I found a picture (its the exact same picture) used by two different observers, for the same organism, and there is no indication of authorship.
both have the same observation date, locality is shifted for maybe 100 m, and one was posted a year before the other.
Should I flag, ask the observers to clarify themselvs, if so, how?
In this situation, I think it’s acceptable to flag the photo posted more than a year late for copyright infringement, and also leave a polite comment explaining the issue for the observer.
If they had permission to use the photo, but the date and/or locality were off (in reference to the original observation), then using the DQA would be the appropriate step, though it would also be good to leave a comment.
I would ask first.
Maybe they are related and share the same devices where they keep the photos. Maybe one doesn´t know the other one already posted the picture, or either of them dont remember.
I don´t know how flag work on INAT, but why flag someone when you dont know any ill intention. if you flag people on other website, sometimes 3 strikes takes them down, guilty or not.
I mean, copyright is important, yes, but I dont see why a person would post the same picture again. unless they are some kind of biologist, searching for the next best shot species of their life, there is no reason to steal.
I’d ask first. It might be a shared observation and one of them mixed up the years (happens a lot in early January). They shouldn’t use the same picture but inexperienced accounts might not know, so giving them a chance to fix things might be best. And if they do not respond (in a reasonable way) the flag can be more substantial.
Also in favour of asking first. Is the user who posted first still active? If not, perhaps they have lost the password to the old account.
In a situation like that, you might also check Google Images to see if they both pulled the photo from somewhere else. (When I put in a copyright flag, I try to remember to put in a link to the source where I found the shot.)
I’d ask before flagging.
We sometimes have that issue when posting photos from our anti-poaching of fieldwork, I and one of my staff may accidentally both post the same photo.
It’s also not at all uncommon for two people in the same area at the same time to take pretty much identical photos, then upload them at different times with different levels of accuracy. Depending on their camera settings or their file management the dates can even be different. As an example of that latter bit, one of the office shared drives we used in the past kept changing the dates of all files we stored there to 2014.
Another things that’s not uncommon is for someone to ask the other person for a copy of the photo.
In short, ask before flagging, there are a number of possible benign explanations that don’t involve copyright violations.
For a one-off instance like this, there’s any number of innocent explanations. Perhaps a couple had an account between them, then later set up a second account to have one each as they got more heavily involved in iNat. Or maybe somebody just lost their login (or even forgot they already had an account) and set up another one. Perhaps somebody asked a friend to post their photo, then later became interested enough in iNat to create their own account. Many possibilities.
Regardless, it is not an ideal situation, so it may be worth commenting on the later observation (or both) to check, and suggest one be removed. Just do so with the appreciation that it’s more likely an oversight than an intentional violation or copyright issue. In any case, it’s probably not worth wasting a lot of your time on unless there are many repeated obs.