So you'd do the work if it were not productive but not otherwise? Like, if they just threw away your input into the CAPTCHA after confirming you're human, you're okay with that? Or do you just hate CAPTCHAs on principle?

It's an ethical distinction for some. I am completely fine with a type of captcha that helps improve some public domain or free/libre licensed resource (e.g., proofreading words scanned from public domain works). I am not okay with helping some megacorporation sanitize their proprietary database or training their machine learning neural networks for free.

As mentioned elsewhere in this topic; I'd much rather spend some of my free time to help improve OpenStreetMap (and I do).

But what if it's a generic captcha. It doesn't improve anything. Are you okay with that?

A generic captcha doesn't use the work done by the user. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think I can guess what could be their answer.

What would it be? It's not clear to me.

Going from throwing away the work to improving Google's image recognition is a Pareto improvement so I'm interested in the justification.

But to me this is not a Pareto improvement (i.e., this is subjective). I consider the bolstering of the hold Google (and Apple, and Amazon, and Microsoft) has over a number of common domains (and in a broader sense our lives) to be undesirable and unethical. So when I correctly teach Google's proprietary image recognition software what a traffic sign, mountain, store front (ugh, these are the worst), or tree is, I am (even in the strict economic sense of a Pareto improvement) harming myself.

Ah. All Right. Thanks.

Not everyone is using the same ethical model as you?

Probably. If they were why would I ask them to justify their position? It would trivially correspond with mine.

Imagine you're at an airport and an inspector takes your batteries out of your luggage. All other things being equal, does it matter if he tosses them in the trash, or keeps them for his personal use?

From one perspective it doesn't matter - your batteries are gone either way.

But from another perspective, inspectors who keep what they find have completely different motivations - making the same outcome much more sinister and corrupt.

It makes sense there because the actual consequences are undesirable. What are the undesirable consequences we're incentivising here? That Google will cover the entire web in captchas?

That Google gets an unfair advantage compared to other companies, making it harder to start a new company able to compete with Google on Machine Learning? (Which is already impossible, because Google uses the knowledge from ReCaptcha, GMail, etc unfairly)

For a more accurate money analogy: Imagine he resells them.

this comes to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7fE9_7_7A

But you use their service for free, right?

Neither the host or google ask for money in exchange for their services. The profitability of their chosen business model is not my concern.

If they want something in return, perhaps they should consider setting up a paywall.

What's going to stop you from just stealing the content from behind the paywall because the profitability of their chosen business model is not your concern?

Their competence in restricting access to the information and preventing its decimation, I suppose.

And you really believe that to be ethical and normal? Do you apply those same beliefs to the physical world? Is it okay to just take goods and services with no payment as long as you are physically able to?

No, I do not believe it is okay to take physical goods or receive services with no payment. I do however believe that people should be free to send and receive any information they wish, regardless of the wishes of the "owner" of said information. Sharing information without the right holder's involvement will not make them loose access to it.

If you, as a site owner, don't want people to share information your server sent to their computers, implement strong DRM or don't allow off-premise access altogether. You might loose many prospective users, but at least your information will remain "safe". Probably.

If you want to share information on a website but can't think of a reasonable way to make money of it, that's your problem, not mine.

Lastly, I fail to see how a discussion on copyright relates to recaptchas or even site-owners' failed business models. Unless you can get this thread back on topic, perhaps we should continue this (most likely frutless) discussion somewhere else.

I feel this is on topic as it relates to you using Google services without payment.

This isn't information sharing, this is using a service which has costs (hardware, software, employee time, power, cooling, etc...). You are using the ReCAPTCHA service. If you don't pay them for that (either in time or in money) then in my opinion you are stealing the cost of that service.

Just like how if you got a taxi, then just walked away without paying. Yeah, you aren't stealing any physical goods, but you are costing the taxi company something and you aren't paying for it. And if you agreed to get a free taxi ride in exchange for washing their taxi car for them, and you just walked away at the end, that would be stealing in my eyes.

Using the reCAPTCHA service lets them use the data from it for machine learning. That's the reason they are providing it for free, and if you attempt to use the service without paying (or in your scenario maliciously provide false information, which not only doesn't contribute, but can mess up the results from those who do), I feel you are stealing it just the same.

I disagree that it is stealing because I never agreed (or wanted) to participate in this program. The site owner did.

I'm under no obligation (moral or otherwise) to make honest contributions. If we wanted to continue with your analogy, it'll be like being forced into a taxi, then driven one meter, then forced to pay a large fee because the landlord doesn't want me to walk on his lawn. I didn't choose to ride the taxi. The landlord did (ignoring saner options).

If google wants a revenue from their service, they should consider charging site owners.

If google wants to train their NNs, they'll have to pay people to classify data for them.

If google doesn't want to do either, and doesn't want people like me contributing to their system, don't let site owners allow us to use their site.

Otherwise, I think google should shutdown the service.

If you really want to keep using the analogy, it's like you going to a restaurant and they require you to take a taxi to the actual location (and tell you the cost upfront), and you just take it then refuse to pay.

You do have the option of not using a service that uses recaptcha. Nobody is forcing you to fill them out, you are making the choice to do it because you want the service the site owner is providing, and the site owner wants recaptcha.

Nah, the owner wants to block scrappers.

If a taxi company keeps getting screwed over by patrons of a given restaurant, the company should stop providing service for said patrons, seek compensation directly from the people who require their service (the restaurant), or seek legal action against either the patrons or the restaurant.

Demanding otherwise is just naive.

A paywall is going to stop far more people from using a product than a captcha.

4chan used to have a campaign where they'd collectively replace the obviously-unknown word in the ReCaptcha text captchas with the n-word to poison the results...