I find this discussion and the licensing choice page in iNaturalist very confusing. Can anyone explain in simple terms what choice I make and apply to make my content free to be shared by widest group possible?
Thanks, Rob
1 Like
There was a very recent thread that I think might have been helpful which I cannot find for the life of me, but I am sure the knowledgeable folks who explained the differences in that one will pop up again.
I have been very happy with my CC-NC choice, and have been contacted by numerous students and researchy types for use of my photos in their works. I feel helpful! I hope you are able to find whatever license feels best for you, too.
2 Likes
Public domain (no license)
3 Likes
The most open option is CC0. With this option people can use your content without crediting you. This is what I use for all my iNat photos.
The other main option is CC-BY, which means anyone can use it for anything, but they must provide credit and a link to the Creative Common license.
I would NOT recommend using the non-commercial licenses as this imposes a lot of restrictions on how people can use it. For example, non-commercially licensed photos cannot be added to Wikipedia.
2 Likes
Why wouldnât wikipedia be able to use a non-commercial photo? They are a non-profit company, arenât they? They just cannot use the photo under a more permissive license than you originally assign it (e.g. they cannot post it as a CC0 license if you originally assign it a CC-BY-NC license). Personally, I donât want to allow others to use or adapt my photos to make a profit without my permission, so I use a CC-BY-NC-SA license. What you assign to your photos is your personal choice, but if youâre at all worried about others using your photos to make profit (or for any other purpose that you may not approve of), âall rights reservedâ is the safest choice.
P.S. hereâs a link to the creative commons website that describes what each of the different license attributions mean: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
1 Like
Note - I moved this to its own topic, split off from the feature request where the question was originally asked.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy :
Licenses which restrict the use of the media to non-profit or educational purposes only (i.e. non-commercial use only), or which are given permission to appear only on Wikipedia, are not free enough for Wikipediaâs usages or goals and will be deleted
2 Likes
Okay, understood. Thatâs a wikipedia policy issue rather than a license issue, though, if I understand correctly. Wikipedia is choosing not to use non-commercially licensed photos.
1 Like
I made this table as an overview for another thread (which got unlisted) but it seems to apply here as well. The one thing Iâm not sure about is where GLOBI fits in, but since Iâve seen it noted on my observations that were also shared to GBIF Iâm assuming it uses the same licensing rules.
5 Likes
@ItsMeLucy I wrote a post recently out of anger that many of my iNat pics were being sold by Alamy for $45 each with no accredition and without a Botswana photography permit. The post has been taken down/unlisted by iNat, perhaps because Alamy was being accused of being unlawful (strong words like crooks, stealing and unethical were being used). It was a concern for me since the taking of pics of wildlife in Botswana for commercial purposes requires the buying of a photography permit. Since now, Alamy is using my pics for commercial purposes, without my permission, am I now liable in Botswana to buy photography permits since I was the original photographer, even though I myself am not selling the pics and Alamy is pirating the pictures and selling them. I have kept a copy of that thread, in which you participated. My question now is should Alamy now pay for Photography Permits in Botswana for each of the pics they are trying to sell ? Botswana is losing revenue from the sale of photos, without their photographic permits being bought. I think Alamy is acting unlawfully, at least according to the laws of Botswana. And am I now complicit ? Perhaps the govt of Botswana could/should sue Alamy !
@botswanabugs I understand your concern, but please keep this thread on topic - it was split from an original thread so that it could stay focused on the topic of âwhich license to choose to share most widelyâ - not a specific situation involving use of iNat photos. Thanks.
1 Like
i think this probably needs some clarifications and corrections.
- GloBI appears to get any research grade observation with particular observation fields indicating some sort of interaction, regardless of license.
- what matters for GBIF is the observation license, not the image or audio licenses.
- what matters for typical Wikimedia use is the image or audio license, not the observation license. also, i donât think âshare to Wikimediaâ is the the right way to describe this. whereas iNat does actively push data to GBIF (âshare to GBIFâ), itâs not actively sharing anything to Wikimedia. instead, Wikimedia contributors can take stuff with certain licenses from iNat and use it on Wikimedia. the original author of the media could also separately share their media to Wikimedia, providing an appropriate license there, regardless of what the license is in iNat.
- i think âallow license changesâ is a little ambiguous. for any observation, photo, or sound, you can change your license at any time (although folks already using those items under a previous license can continue to use those under the old license terms). what the share-alike provision in a CC license does is it requires others to share copies or derivatives with a similar license as the original.
- â(i.e. research)â after âFair Useâ isnât really accurate. research is not automatically a fair use case. additionally, even if you could claim fair use for some research cases, some publishers â using their own standards â wonât publish your work if youâre not using appropriately licensed data.
- if youâre going to include sharing to third parties like GBIF, i would also include inclusion of any licensed image in the AWS Open Data Set. with AI / computer being a major use case for the iNat data, itâs worth noting that any licensed image will end up in that set. (this is also notable because iNat does not pay the cost of hosting these images.)
1 Like
âAll rights reservedâ is kind of a weird case, and I donât really know why inat offers that as an option - itâs one of those boilerplate things that people parrot on copyright notices because theyâve seen it said somewhere else - but what it actually means is that you give nobody any licence to use or redistribute the work for any purpose whatsoever.
If it wasnât for the inat ToS overriding that in the case of things uploaded to inat, even inat would have no permission to use things you licenced that way. Itâs not clear if even fair use is permitted in the case where strict proprietary rights have been entirely reserved, and attribution is moot because you arenât allowed to redistribute it at all - so it probably doesnât really belong (or get any ticks) on that table at all.
Not just a similar licence, it must be a compatible one, that grants all users the same rights, and adds no additional restrictions to what the original licence gave to you. The SA and copyleft licences are the only ones which guarantee that all the rights which you originally granted to everyone will persist in perpetuity.
Thanks for the clarifications! I was basing GBIF/Wikimedia on the pull-downs available when checking the license types on iNat and trying to combine that with tables found online:
It doesnât really specify what itâs doing with GBIF vs. Wikimedia. I guessed at GLOBI and apparently guessed wrong - good to know! I have no idea what the AWS Open Data Set is or what it can be used for. It sounds like that might be something of interest though. Maybe the iNat info/help pages could be updated with all this info?
I donât want to drag this offtopic, or back into the territory that resulted in the other thread being unlisted - but this does highlight a couple of things that are very relevant to this thread, and why people who might care about how else what they upload is used probably should spend a bit of time trying to understand the full consequences of the licence(s) they choose for that material.
I feel your pain, but this is empirically not true. You gave everyone in the world permission to do that (and pretty much whatever else they like - other than any moral rights that the laws of where you live might give authors limiting âoffensiveâ use or misrepresentation) without needing to ever ask you further, when you licenced those photos CC0 / public domain. Thatâs what that licence explicitly does.
Since the inat Terms of Use say:
If You post material to the Platform, or otherwise make (or allow any third party to make) material available by means of the Platform (any such material, âContentâ), You are entirely responsible for the content of, and any harm resulting from Your use of, that Content.
Then yes, you probably are. If you didnât have the rights to licence that material as liberally as you did, then itâs you who have overstepped the rights you had to it - and if you owed whoever owns those rights a fiduciary duty, thatâs probably contributory negligence. You may have even opened the door for any morally questionable company which used that material in line with the licence you gave them to seek redress from you for any damages they allege that has caused them - if what you say about not having those rights in the first place is true âŚ
That may not be what you ever intended - but by not understanding the licence you granted, it is exactly what you did.
If you donât care at all what anyone later does with what you upload (including that it remains freely available to others under those same terms in perpetuity), then CC0 places the least restrictions on what other people can do. But if you do care, then you need to spend some time figuring out what other licence protects the things you care about the best.