I think unless it’s a photo of a book, you shouldn’t flag it. Just because it’s good doesn’t mean it’s plagerized. It means take a closer look.
Did anything turn up on a reverse image search?
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Not for iNat purposes, but I’ve taken a digital photo of a nice snake pic published in a book to provide a voucher photo for a good location record. I had the permission of the photographer who could not find the original print/slide photo from many years earlier (but had the date/location info) so it was a legitimate use. But I could see where someone might think otherwise.
I’ve also been duped by a photographer (a very good one) who provided me an excellent and diagnostic photo of an animal that was way out of the range where it should’ve been found. I even talked to the guy in person and saw all his expensive camera equipment. It turns out, after some fruitless surveys at the alleged observation site and investigating photos on the web, that he had taken a public-domain photo of the animal off the web, by a different photographer and from a different location in the country, and presented it as his own.
Moral of the story is you can’t always know for sure what the story really is.
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One that usually prompts me to double check is a vast range in the quality of photos in their observations. i.e, it’s not that all their photos are “too good”, it’s that their photos are all over the place between amateur & professional - not just equipment issues like image clarity, but in how they compose the shot, center it, etc.
Mine are all over the place; I often find stuff during SAR training and I don’t carry any camera with me for that; so it’s cell phone shots - these are also taken on the move and I have seconds to grab a photo so quality definitely lacks and is a fast voucher shot. I also don’t often have it with me when doing work on our land; so again cell phone in my pocket. Then I have some (i think, ha) wonderfully lit macro cave invertebrate photos… sooo quite the complex photo situation!
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Which is very close to the scenarios I mentioned in that same post:
Not on the one picture I tried to find, I did not look on the 7 other observations, though.
I have to say I am less confident now with searching for images on the web - seems like it doesn’t look for the precise image easily any more. But nothing exact seemed to show up, and you can see the edge of the page in the obs, so it’s not a screenshot from the web.
If the user were responsive I could feel differently…
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I think that’s the case for most people with lots of observations honestly. I’ve got some reasonably good photos but oh so many bad ones where it’s just not a good photo but it is OK for identification purposes.
Why do people upload copyrighted images? What purposes does it serve for them? Why is this a thing?
Why does anyone do what they do? My example above – an accomplished photographer faking the ownership and location for an animal photo – is not really explicable. At least I can’t explain it. Incidents like that have made me extra-skeptical of extraordinary claims.
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If uploading someone else’s photo can be explained by good intentions and not so good but with lack of unerstanding (when students fake reports, but they don’t think that data will be used by somebody else), case you mentioned is something very out of lines, for someone with reputation it sounds to be so dangerous to do without mention on how anybody can feel good about totally faking something they didn’t see.
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If you are using Google Lens, you can scroll down to the bottom for retry with Google Images, then check for an exact match. Click click clunky, but it works.
I get a selection of visually similar images, but I don’t see a check for an exact match. I have “search by image” selected in tools - is that the same thing? Seems like it used to be a lot easier.
Well, that’s different. 2 options I see there:
- You could reach out to the person (leave a comment on the observation or send a DM)
You can ask them what book the photo is from, or be direct and ask if they took the original photo. - You could flag it & leave a comment on the flag.
In the comment say that you can see the page edge in the photo, and let the curator reach out to the user when then contact them to see if the flag can be resolved
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I don’t know re: “most” people. Nature photography is a specific skillset, and some people’s best photos still won’t look like calendar shots.
But like I said; a range in the quality of photos is a starting point for taking a closer look; it’s not proof of wrongdoing.
I have the TinEye extension installed on Chrome- when you right click on the photo, you can then select “search image on tineye” and it looks for the exact same image. I also do reverse google image searches (again, it looks for the same image) using the RevIndex extension.
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I am on Google Chrome - it takes a while for images to become searchable. But if the photo was scraped from the web, then it should show up in your screenshot.
In the search box at the top you can add ‘a descriptive word’ (if you know the species?) to prompt the computer to look for the right thing. Like iNat the computer is looking for matching pixels not for THAT, so your example has lots of butterflies, but also birds, fish, slug … with the same sort of matching speckles.
I check each day for photos downloaded from my blog, and it is interesting to see what Google thinks that is … my mountain view emigrated to Columbia yesterday - at a quick glance the landscape could be confused.
It is also worth to go trough iconic genera like “panthera”. I often find copyrighted material there.
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Do we have a list somewhere with taxa that frequently have images scooped from around web? I just went through Venus flytrap observations including captive/casual and oh my I don’t think I’ve ever come across so many stock photos and blatant copyright infringements in any of my other ID activities on iNat. I’m sure I missed a ton by clicking reviewed on a lot of them before I picked up on it and started looking at pictures more closely (like, several users uploading the exact same stock images).
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I’ll often go through “casual” observations of threatened mammals (particularly carnivores), and just quickly scan the pages for unusually nice-looking photos - there’s generally quite a few violations in there.
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Check the oh wow award winning photo
against the row of humdrum recent photos below.
Is this observer the actual award winning photographer?
I have done it a great deal as a university professor teaching and preparing powerpoints for lectures and seminars. It is done carefully, always citing the source, and under Fair Use ( https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ ) . It is done for education and not for personal profit or with imagery that isn’t already widely available via the web. And it is always removed if the copyright owner reaches out and requests that it not be used… although I’ve only heard of that happening once in our department.
Hence, it never occurred to me that I would run afoul of this rule regarding using someone else’s imagery if I uploaded Google Streetview Screenshots of Creosote and Joshua Trees. I was trying to find a northern range limit for both species and thought of Google Streetview as an approach. I posted one image of each species, described exactly what they were… in other words I did not try to pass them off as my images… and that it was a “proof of concept.” They both reached research grade before they were “grayed out” with the copyright infringement logo. I am pretty sure it is not a copyright infringement and would be covered under fair use in any US court, but it IS in retrospect a violation of the iNat rule that it must be evidence that the observer was witness to the organism. I was mildly disappointed because it takes a bit of work to search for the northernmost streetview images of organisms large enough to get an identifiable image. And because it would perhaps have extended our knowledge of these species ranges.
Just wanted to provide an example of a well-intentioned upload of a copyrighted image, since you asked.
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Google copyright is all over their footage, so I wouldn’t be so sure that uploading them under your copyright would fly well in court if it would happen for some reason.
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