Spotting copyright violations

I don’t like to change IDs on copyright problem observations, because it is in fact that organism, but I am always willing to give them every assistance in vanishing from the map. Because if they used a copied image, they can’t know the date or location, and the (now flagged) image is gone, so DQA becomes
Date is Accurate No
Location is Accurate No
Evidence of Organism No
there was a time when these were ID’d by others to Velociraptor, but that too is false.

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Changing the id of obviously bogus submissions has other benefits.

It only takes the user to vote yes the DQA to reset it to equilibrium, it takes more than 1 id to offset my explicit dissenting ID.

It removes it from any cases where people are reviewing records for issues, or even exports.

It removes it from any projects impacted by the fakery, unfortunately not the few grandfathered ones with auto aggregation, but most.

I am sure there are others.

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good points Chris, I’ll add “Life” to my triple-tap

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I literally just caught one for this exact reason. Photo was grainy and identified as something way out of range. Right click > Search Google for this image. Turns out it’s a stock photo of “grass” used on multiple websites.

I will say that I’m impressed how rarely I find copyright violations on iNat. Considering the volume of submissions, I’d expect them to be more common.

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Thanks for this great tutorial, @cmcheatle!

Just wanted to add that other browsers besides chrome have add-ons/extensions for searching Google images. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-reverse-image-search/ for Firefox, but there are others.

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Just because a photo pops up in Google image search doesn’t mean it’s a copyright infringement. I noticed a new inat user had a couple high quality watermarked photos taken from a blog and after a little digging I found they write the blog and they had taken the photos.

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Regarding “photos of photos/screens”, rather than “signs they are infringing”, i think of them as triggers to ask some probing (but polite) questions… usually framed in terms of “i have marked this as ‘no evidence’, let me know if you actually saw it”… I know I’m active and will be around to change my DQA, but too often the observer never responds…

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I really appreciate getting to look at so many excellent beautiful photos on the site from some very talented photographers. When I see a really great photo from a user I don’t recognize I click on it to see their other photos too. Sometimes then I see the clues that were already mentioned that lead me to do a reverse image search. If the photo is linked to on blogs dated years ago, but the user states they took the photo the day before that is a pretty good clue, but I still try to phrase my comment in a not so accusatory fashion. I think it’s possible the observation date was taken from the file date which may have been incorrect and the user just didn’t fix the observation date afterwards.

In about half of the cases that I’ve seen though, the user actually points out in their description that the photo is not theirs, but it “looks just like” what they saw. Quite often those observations have even already reached research grade. Many identifiers must not read observation descriptions very often.

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There are a lot of identifiers that work off the identify page and use the agree button, so they don’t see descriptions or even comments on the observations. We need to lose those “Agree” buttons…

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Would that be appropriate for this case here? https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/35220647

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In this instance the observation was uploaded using the Android app. A small sample of her observations suggests she is only using the Android app and thus would not be seeing comments. The user is in the habit of taking images of screens, at least screens of a camera:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18338483
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17579901
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17579379
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/16979999
This appears to be her way of uploading images captured with her camera: take a picture of the camera screen with a smartphone. Given that the images are in a camera, the benefit of the doubt has to go to those being her images. Her workflow for getting images into iNaturalist is a tad different. The location may be problematic: a number of the locations appear to be the location at which the camera was imaged by the phone which appears to have occurred in a residence.

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And as observation photos are published on iNat credited to the observer, with their copyright, this is copy-fraud anyway - so is indeed a form of copyright violation.

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This is quite common, some find it easier to do than downloading photos from their camera and uploading them to the website (or perhaps don’t know about the website - another topic!). Some also find it convenient to post observations from the field by using the app to capture their cameras preview screen, then upload better quality image when they get back to base (especially if their camera doesn’t have GPS).

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Another good resource, that has been around longer than Google’s reverse image search, is https://tineye.com/. It also allows you to sort the results by date and hence find the earliest, and hence possibly original, posting of the image.

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Comments are on there, you just have to drop down the menu to get them. Which you are right, she may not notice.

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“Search Google for Image” is no longer an option on Chrome, is there some way to work around this for spotting these?

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Is it there if you go to images.google.com first?

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How’s that? You can click on the pic and choose search in Google.

That’s not an option anymore, it’s been replaced by Google Lens.

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Thanks! I just checked to see if it worked using the first image that came up on the Explore page. Funnily enough it turned out to be a copyright violation.

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