Comment by goodplay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodplay | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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