I’m not sure, but this might be a question @cazort can answer.
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Perfect. A lot of these pics are from wikimedia commons, I’m noticing; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pinus_engelmannii#/media/File:Pinus_engelmannii_forest.jpg this photo is one of the photos for Pinus engelmannii, and it looks like its an open license.
EDIT: The more I look at this, the more its becoming clear that a huge number of these photos were pulled from Wikimedia commons - so I wonder if this is more of an issue of someone unscrupulously uploading something there that shouldn’t have been, and then the editors just… pulled from there without double checking.
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https://www.wildflower.org/gallery/result.php?id_image=42577
So not specifically iNat related, but this pictures and another are used on the page for Alnus maritima - there is a very clear note on the site that photography on the site is not for publication. Now this doesn’t mean that the books didn’t contact the copyright holders, but I still find it suspicious
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Someone could have uploaded their picture both to inat and commons. If it looks like someone else uploaded the picture to commons, did they also alter the license field on commons?
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Everything I found in commons so far looks licensed properly - which is great, but also I’m a little mad that I bought this book and 90% of the photos are just pulled from the first few photos on wikimedia.
Its a nightmare to try to go through everything though - none of the photos are individually credited, its all just the thank you page in the back that I posted.
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CC licenses have specific legal code that go with them. these are the actual terms for CC BY 4.0 (which is what iNat points to for their CC BY license): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
i’m not sure if any of the images used were licensed using these specific terms. if so, the person using the images should have, among other things, identified the creator and any other folks who should receive credit in the manner requested by the licensor, included a copyright notice, to the extent reasonably practicable included a URI or link to the licensed material, and noted that the material was modified (if it in fact was). regarding how to include this information, the license says only that it must be done in “any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context”.
obviously, there could be differing opinions on what “reasonable” means in these contexts, and really, as with everything else in copyright, you’re only going to be able to resolve any differences in opinion via negotiation or in court (unfortunately).
older versions of the CC BY license have slightly different conditions, as summarized here: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart
the example above from Wiki Commons is licensed as CC BY 2.0 over there. interestingly if you follow the link to the source material, the photo at Flickr is currently licensed CC BY-NC 2.0. in a case of conflicting licenses like this, i believe that if the photo was actually licensed CC BY 2.0 at some point, that license is nonrevokable, and Wiki Commons can continue to effectively redistribute it under CC BY 2.0.
that said, i wonder what kind of review process happens at Wiki Commons so that they don’t become some sort of copyright laundering operation? i can see that there is a note in the Wiki Commons entry that someone reviewed the license to make sure it was accurate at the time, but i wonder if there’s evidence of that beyond a note like that? if someone were to challenge this in court, it seems like absent such evidence, and absent some sort of certification of the general process, you’d need to somehow get the person who added the photo and the person who reviewed the license to testify (good luck with that).
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My experience with field guides is the editor/publisher reaches out to the photographer and asks if they can use the photo. Sometimes they offer a payment for the use, or a free copy of the book. Other times they might expect you to donate it. If the use is non-commercial and is educational/conservation-oriented, I’m happy to let them use it. If it’s commercial (for profit) we need to talk about it.
Audubon is a non-profit group but if they are scraping photos off the web without contacting the photographers and then selling the product, that’s not okay, even if the money gets rolled back into non-profit activities. They need to change their approach and make sure they have the permission of photographers. Especially if somewhere in the publishing process someone is making money off it.
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but the field guide is a commercial product. a non-commercial clause applies to the use, not to the user.
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I have a mind to start leaving reviews for the field guides we know did this…giving an overview of the problems and maybe even a link to this thread for folk who want to fact check for themselves. But I don’t know if that would hurt potential legal action, which I feels need to be taken. I also feel like no one should be buying these books.
Lawyers are expensive, and the stakes here relatively small. A letter to the responsible party–which looks like Fieldstone in this case–may yield a satisfactory solution for any injured party or parties. If Fieldstone is nonresponsive, Knopf and Audubon both have their names attached and may be worth appealing to.
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Is it bad that I want to buy this guide to get hands on it? I see a few mycologists on that list that I KNOW are really active on iNat (Alan Rockefeller is a huge one, but it looks like his uploads are CC-BY which I think would be okay?)
But I see some local midwestern people I’m very familiar with on that list that have their stuff listed as CC-by-NC which would be a serious no, but maybe they were pulled from another database with different copyrights?
I’m linking this in my local mushroom group on facebook and I’m going to see if anyone reached out to them.
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Wiki commons doesn’t own that material - you have to follow the photo and find the actual original. Their CC BY doesn’t override the owner’s CC-BY-NC. I think any chasing down them being in wiki commons isn’t really helpful (unless you don’t want your photos used in it personally) - it would still be wholly on the commercial use publisher (in this case, Audubon) to contact the actual content owner for permission for use.
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Yes, I agree. Not the same as using a photo in some product/display that isn’t sold.
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I’m more wondering if the photos were also posted on mushroomobserver by the original observer with a different license than what they use on iNat
EDIT: basically, Mushroom Observer seems like it defaults to creative commons v3.0 license, and some of the people I recognize are credited by their mushroomobserver usernames, not their inat usernames
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Thanks for uploading that - I found a name of someone I know who isn’t on iNat (they use Flickr), and to my knowledge always uses full copyright on their images so I let them know.
Yes, in fact, I would reckon that that may be what even spurred this post. @kgivens your one post I can see on MO seems to be of Pleurotus citrinopileatus that is posted under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. It also lists you in the credits in the format MO displays usernames. From your original post you seem a little unsure how many images are used-- is it possible that it’s just for that species?
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Are they though? I have no skin in the game here and have only been lurking the thread, but to me it sounds like this is an issue that spans multiple books, likely dozens of users, and potentially hundreds of photographs. That’s a big, big problem. The author or whomever added these photos should be fully aware of copyright, and multiple players in the publishing process as well. I have no idea about this whole process but I’d find it hard to argue that this was anything but stealing of many other people’s property and selling it.
That’s not to say that there couldn’t be some other way that things fell through, but still there is some part (whether it be on the publisher side or some intermediate website) where wrongdoing is involved. I have no idea what looking into this entails, since as mentioned the individual photos aren’t credited it seems like it would be very difficult to track exactly which have been used in violation of that photo’s copyright license. Then there’s the issue of the fact that copyright for each photo can be changed at any time so one might be able to argue that they were OK for commercial use at one point. It all seems pretty hairy and complex.
To me it seems like this is a lot more than one innocent mistake and there needs to be some action to make things right.
edit: that is to say if there is clear evidence that photos with non-commercial licenses have been used without consent or other clear copyright violations, which seems to be the case here.
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I suspect that’s most of it but I see at least one user that has non-commercial licenses listed for their stuff on both iNat and Mushroomobserver - is @mycowalt active on the forums?
Anyone who finds their name included as a photographer should be able to ask the publisher for a list of their photos used and where they got them from.
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