Read the US “Fair Use” Law. I wouldn’t be uploading them under “my” copyright if I stated that I wasn’t. I would be uploading under Fair Use.
iNat staff stated to not post streetview screenshots, so anyway it shouldn’t be posted even as casual observation.
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I think where this may run afoul of Fair Use is in the act of sharing to a world-wide audience online. I’m also using copyrighted material under fair use while teaching, but I share this within the class room only. The moment you make something available to everyone by sharing it on the web, copyright rules may apply much more stringently. I tried to read up on it at some point and I think the argument is that you are sharing something that somebody else is restricting use of because they want to make money from it. Thus, by your act of sharing for free you are hurting their ability to make a profit.
E.g. I like to show video footage from David Attenborough’s excellent nature documentations and animations provided by textbook publishers in the class room. All perfectly acceptable under fair use - the textbook publishers actually provide their animations for precisely that purpose when you adopt one of their books for teaching.
When we suddenly all had to move to online teaching during the pandemic, I (as many others) recorded lectures and posted them on YouTube trusting that this would still be covered by Fair Use. I would get a copyright strike on every one that included the above material, even if I just had like 2 minutes of narration that wasn’t my own in the entire lecture and kept the videos restricted so only my students with a direct link from the course website could watch it. My solution was to re-record without sound on the videos/animations I showed and add my own narration over those segments. So yeah, fair use in the classroom is different from sharing the same material online.
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Good point. Now that I think about it, I only posted my own material on YouTube, while I continued to post copyrighted material under fair use to our Learning Management System (Moodle-based) which was accessible only to the campus community. I withdraw my example ;-)
This is the story of my life! I have a backlog for days (technically months and years) but my son loves his gadgets so he just keeps taking more pictures. The backlog has a lot of cruddy pictures that are just good enough to ID and then the ones he takes now are much, much prettier. My wife has done professional photography, so her pictures are always much nicer than any ones that I’d take, too. So, there’s a lot of different reasons why the quality fluctuates for me, and I’m sure many others have similar fluctuations due to similar reasons or completely different, but completely valid, reasons. I like that you made it a point to say it!
I think copyright violations are more common with people who have fewer observations or people who have only suspicious looking observations. If somebody has tens of thousands of observations with varying quality, I think it’s usually more of what you said above, rather than stolen images. Context can help a lot with weeding out what’s really theirs from what’s not.
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I am wondering how to approach someone who’s post is obviously a screen shot of another iNaturalist user’s observation. Do I comment on both posts and ask the users to clarify who took the photo, and other details like location and date? Do I flag the one that is an obvious screen shot as a copyright violation in the meantime?
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If it’s a screenshot of someone else observation it’s safer to flag it and leave a comment, questioning what is happening.
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It’s funny you mentioned searching for copyrigt infringement within iNat, @rndonley , because occasions where the original photo was on iNat seem to be the hardest for reverse image searches in Lens, Bing, Tineye & Google images to find!
For instance:
I had one I recently flagged where the 2nd user had submitted 2 observations of species that
- I have observed before, and
- another identifier commented that one of those does not exist in their location.
For one observation, when I looked at the photo in original size, I could see the top left corner had some shadowed, partially bisected text:
.
Due to point 1 above, I made an educated guess that the text was “Travis County, TX, USA”.
Even if I edited that photo to remove that, however, none of the reverse image searches found it.
I probably could have still reported it, but whenever I flag for copyright, I put a comment on my flag showing the source; as I don’t like to flag without solid “proof”.
I suspected the original was from iNat (it looked like the same font from a location filter), but since no images searches found it, I had to MANUALLY look for it in iNat .
I went to that genus’s total observation page, and filtered by place and set an end date for upload, and I STILL had to go through pages of observations before I found the original, so I could flag the copyright infringement and provide a source.
The point of that long, rambling retelling is that it’s very difficult to reverse image search within iNat for truly stolen photos (not accounts sharing photos, but actually plagiarizing another iNatter).
And that was only one observation! As mentioned above, the same user has another observation of a different species that fits 1 & 2 above, but is cropped without leaving clues, so I haven’t found anything yet (and I don’t consider “they copyright infringed once for a species found in Texas, that means this other observation of a species found in Texas MUST also have been copied” to be a good enough reason to flag).
In fact, the only other instance I can remember offhand where I found an instance of plagiarism within iNat was when someone copied a Greg Lasley (R.I.P.) photo, and I only found that because he’d also published it OUTSIDE of iNat.
So, all of that to say: anyone have tips for Reverse Image Searching within iNat? Because using site:inaturalist.org with GIS doesn’t cut it, and the other searches I listed at the top of this block of text don’t seem to find things either.
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Ouch. That is a lot of work, but thanks for putting the time in.
For the case I asked about, I noticed it because I follow certain geographic regions and both posts showed up in my dashboard. Someone else suggested that it could have been an innocent group-sharing situation (eg maybe the people were together when they saw the animal but only one of them had the phone app so that person made the original post and, since there isn’t a way to “share” an observation in iNaturalist, the other person used a screen shot to add the species to their lifelist). So instead of flagging the obvious screen shot, I put a comment in both observations, something along the lines of “this appears to be a duplicate of [insert URL to other post]. Please confirm which post has the correct location and date”.
I haven’t looked back to see what happened after I commented.
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I too would like to be able to do this! I’ll usually check the main taxon page - a surprising number of people will just take one of the featured pics from that page - and maybe also check the pics sorted by number of favorites. But I’m sure there are many more I just can’t find.
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I have a question to make sure I have been taking appropriate action and not creating a bunch of false flags. I’m assuming screenshots from the sound ID page of the Merlin ID app should be flagged as a copyright violation, correct?
Example from my own phone:
So because the screenshot includes photo icons, this seems to be a clear copyright violation. What if they cropped the screenshot so that only the spectrogram was shown? (I know spectrograms are discourage by iNat staff anyway, but I’m trying to figure out if this should be flagged).
Some relevant sections from the Cornell Lab’s terms of use:
All of the content featured or displayed on the Services, including, but not limited to, still images, text, pictorial works, video images, still images of video, graphic designs, audio recordings, multimedia combinations, and computer programs, including web-based programs (“Content”) is owned or licensed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. […]
- To not reproduce, distribute, modify, re-post on another site (regardless of the server on which the Content is stored) […]
- To refrain from framing or mirroring any portion of the Site […]
If you interpret the text you quoted in the way you seem to be doing, even the audio recordings from Merlin would constitute a copyright violation.
This seems absurd to me. After the initial ID using Merlin, one would have to use a different software in order to hopefully record the bird again. That’s not feasible. Likewise tolerating spectrograms created with Audacity, but prohibiting ones created with Merlin seems absurd as well, let alone impossible to enforce.
Merlin has a button on the app to share sound to iNat; if they had an issue with it I can’t imagine they would.
That copyright clause seems to be more of a ‘cover your ass’ sort of clause than anything else…
Exactly. To me it reads like it’s meant to cover promotional material, example recordings, parts of the manual, etc. Not any user’s recordings, including the associated spectrograms.
Unless I’m misunderstanding, this is a misquote.
The full line is:
Still images…of the audio recordings… Perhaps that’s not what they meant, but I’m confused by the difference between “video images” and “still images of video” if it isn’t what they meant (or I guess I still am regardless).
Regardless, iNat doesn’t want people uploading spectrograms AFAIK
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I haven’t seen that on my app. How does that work? I usually switch from Merlin to iNat and hope the bird keeps singing.
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See Can’t share audio to iNaturalist app from Merlin app (and related Automatically remove photos that were shared from Merlin to iNaturalist).
Though AFAIK, it can still be done in the Android app (in that case see this post).
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Thanks, forgot about that thread. Apparently that sharing doesn’t work with iOS.
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