Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility user access licenses
As a rule, digital datasets managed by the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility are public and free to use, i.e., open data. As a rule, datasets are distributed in accordance with conditions stipulated in the CC BY 4.0 license.
Datasets, including observations stored and published by users in FinBIF services, are distributed through the Laji.fi portal. An exception to the CC BY 4.0 license terms is observation-related information which is sensitive due to reasons of nature conservation that will be made less specific or secret automatically by FinBIF. In addition, FinBIF may have data whose openness and availability may be restricted at the request of data owners or managers as agreed. The rights related to sharing this type of data are also defined on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the user access licenses mentioned above.
As regards the use of photographs, a wide selection of user access licenses applies, since photographs may fall into the category of work protected under copyright law.
For metadata, the license in use is CC0. In general, it is beneficial to share metadata as easily as possible and translate it into other languages when necessary.