I can’t recall where I read/heard about this, but I recently learned observations with photos made during federal government work hours need to be set to public domain copyright status. Can anyone validate that and point me towards some references? If this is the case, I think it would be good to get the word out through various channels, because nobody I’ve worked with in a state or federal capacity seems to be aware of this.
It would be a great thing though! More data to the public is good IMO. But! It would mean GBIF could not ingest those observations, I think…
Oh, ok. That’s good to know. Then I guess my last curiosity is if federal employees are legally obligated to adjust the copyright status for those observations. And maybe state employees as well in some cases.
the way i read it, if you’re making observations part of your official work for the US govt as a US govt employee, those works are excluded from copyright protection. so then the key question is whether you’re making observations as part of your official job or not.
if you’re making observations as part of a survey for your job using iNaturalist, then those clearly would be automatically considered public domain.
if you’re doing observations during a work break, then i think you generally still get copyright, except i’m not sure what happens for observations taken in areas where you otherwise would not be allowed to be if not for your job.
as for state employees, i think it depends on the state. some states do have similar laws that effectively place works in public domain, but some states retain the copyright for themselves. so in the latter case, i’m not sure how you would represent that on iNaturalist, since you can’t indicate that the copyright belongs to some other entity.
Thanks, that’s all very helpful. It seems to me like there is a lot of grey area (as you noted). Additionally, photos made for site condition evaluation that were never formally included in a report seem to fall more into the category of public domain, but it’s not clear.
And I think this may suggest that sensitive species photographed during federal time should not be uploaded at all because the photo file and its accompanying metadata become public domain. Maybe selective embargoes and permissions account for all of that, and I just don’t know enough about it.
in my mind, even if the observations aren’t formally included in a report, the mere act of making them as part of the evaluation work clearly puts the observations in public domatin.
i think what happens here is that you can upload them, and it might even be okay to obscure the coordinates, but if someone makes a FOIA request, then the lawyers and administrators get involved and you may be forced o reveal the underlying coordinates of the observation.
Oh jeez… I suspect a lot of observations need to be edited by a lot of users. Knowing these details would likely change the behavior of a lot of users as well. CC0 is not a crowd pleaser among the observers I’ve interacted with about copyright in general.
in my mind, every employee should realize that the work they do while on the job is owned by their employer. so that’s really the first thing folks need to think about if making observations at work.
where your employer is the federal government and therefore puts all work products into public domain is sort of a secondary thing.
Agreed, but what one “should” is different from what one “does”. Not to throw anyone under the bus, but people I have worked under in the federal government when asked about this have said, go ahead and post anything you find to iNat, but obscure the sensitive species. The nuance of image copyright is not widely understood or considered by various levels of natural resource managers, even those who are particularly adept in species data. This is my point. I think we could do better as a community of getting the word out.
Even as a volunteer at the wildlife refuge (falls under Dept of Interior), any photos or recordings made while volunteering are considered public domain.
That’s really important to know too! There are 10 times as many volunteers as employees in the Department of the Interior. That’s like 600k volunteers.
If it’s a day where I want to wander with my camera, I will do that and then change clothes into the volunteer garb afterward. This way, there’s no gray area.
It is worthwhile to remember that at the Endangered Species Act contains language that precludes inclusion of location specific data from the FOIA. Given the current state of affairs in the USA, I would recommend anyone doing work with or under contract with the Federal government, check with a superior before automatically assuming it is okay to publish data of any sort without specific permission.
I will add that an employee of the US government should have an employment contract and any contractor or subcontractor should have a standard contract that includes confidentiality clauses governing release of data. I believe that in virtually all of those standard clauses, the employee or contractor are precluded from releasing government data without written authorization. So my interpretation of this is that data or photographs you collect while doing anything potentially considered part of your work with the US government would be forbidden without written authorization consistent with your contract. In the past, iNat type data might have been overlooked. In today’s world it could be viewed as grounds for termination with cause.
It’s true that federal employees and contractors are bound by ethics rules and, in some cases, data-handling or confidentiality clauses, it’s not accurate to say that *all* data or photos collected while working for the government are prohibited from public release. In natural resource agencies especially, routine biological observations, landscape photos, and citizen science data are often explicitly encouraged.
There *are* restrictions (particularly around sensitive locations, law-enforcement activity, internal reports, etc.), but those don’t apply to the entirety of deliverabbles. In practice, uploading non-sensitive observations or photos is not automatically a policy violation, and it’s not typically treated as grounds for termination in non-military natural resource work. Military is a whole different story of course.
I’m specifically interested in how these images and data should be licensed, and it sounds like the answer is almost always as public domain.
I’d think that’s between them and their employers, and not any of our business. I mean, what would we do, take it upon ourselves to send emails to all the federal employees? If someone started to tell me what I was supposed to do as part of my job, I’d get real defensive real fast.
I’m not USA citizen. I don’t think government employees’ photos and observations need to be set to public domain copyright status. Only in some circumstances such as law enforcement, the police these days have a video camera and some vids are frequently seen in social media. This suggest those vids are in public domain. One of the rule of copyrights is works in the government are in public domain, unless it is “classified” or sensitive info, like maybe the interior of submarines, nuclear facilities, Army headquarters, underground bunkers.
Generally, you don’t know who is who in iNat or in the internet. The next group of government employees are wildlife rangers, scientists, forestry workers. As in all people on the job, there is a small fraction in each hour, a person can do their own things, such as visit the washroom, have a smoke break etc. The persons may have a personal phone/camera or the person may have a recording device which is paid for by the state and therefore the device is the property of the state. or maybe wildlife webcams. If it is wildlife webcams, they can release as public domain if they want to. It is a drain on resources such as data storage cost.
Just a quick note: as this is an international forum, to avoid confusion, could you change the topic to “U.S. Federal …” Other countries may have similar laws, but this obviously is a discussion of just United States law.
Also, the restrictions on U.S. Federal government works only applies to U.S. Copyright, so it is possible for such a work to be copyrighted in a different country – as a federal employee, I ran into this when publishing in certain foreign journals that claimed copyright to the work, then disclaimed that copyright within the U.S. I agree with @pisum that anything that was done as part of US Federal government work should be CC0 on iNaturalist, but yes, there are always grey areas.