pics of screens
I'm frustrated by the incidence of pictures of screens or screenshots. These are obvious cases where parts of the phone or the screen are present in the picture, or they say in the comments that it's a screenshot of a friend's photo. I should probably just ignore them and move on, but leaving it unaddressed bothers me too.
I don't like to identify even if I can - I hate for such things to make it to research grade. I usually write out a comment about how it is likely the location and date are not accurate, and if they aren't please mark it as such at the bottom, but that doesn't really resolve the issue.
It's apparently that it shouldn't be done. There is lots of discussion about using material other than something you have documented yourself, and the answer is always clearly "no." But I don't see anyone answering anything about what to do when it's encountered.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-it-acceptable-to-create-a-second-account-for-things-that-i-did-not-observe-myself/5558
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/indirect-observations-submitting-observations-made-by-general-public/8787
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/can-i-post-a-screenshot-of-a-satellite-view-from-inaturalist-org/10174/15
Often the person who has posted is long gone - a very long time has elapsed since they have logged on - so the information is not likely to benefit them nor is any effort to correct the problem going to be made. Is this a reason to flag? Should we forcibly be getting rid of these observations? You can't know for sure if the picture is theirs or not, and iNaturalist seems to operate on the principle of presuming innocence, so we should presume it is their photo unless otherwise noted? If it is noted that it is not theirs, is that a reason to flag?
Sometimes it is perfectly ok - there was an instance where someone was submitting observations that she had made from a vacation and for whatever reason the only way she could find to get them into her iNaturalist account was to take a photo of her computer with her telephone. She adjusted the location and date and told me that she had done so.
There is a response for copyright infringement, but unless you know that the photo came from a certain place then I find it's a heavy handed response for someone who just took a picture of a picture and didn't have any intent of breaking a copyright rule - just wanted to figure out what the picture was.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses
There is also a set of instructions for finding out if a copyrighted image is used, but won't work if you are taking a picture of someone else's personal picture.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/fabricated_data
It just seems like a messy situation and there's no clear direction to if we should be engaging with these and identifying them or not, or what.
