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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This seems to happen every time some stuffy SeriousAgency or SeriousCompany opens something up to the public. The public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it.

SeriousCompany: "Look how cool and in tune we are with the public, here's this resource that you can all use. High five! [...] Oh, wait, no, what you're doing is bad for our image... No, stop, we didn't mean for you to do... No, don't enjoy it that way... Wait, stop, we didn't think of that at all! Oh, god no you're using it to post Amogus Porn! SHUT IT DOWN!!!"

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But sometimes SeriousCompany says "we'll provide this public resource so people can do X, Y, and Z", and then someone does A and gets a cease and desist?

It's an open resource, sure, but the provider of the resource can still set limits on its use, even after it's been available for some time. Often that includes things like "don't use our free resource to make yourself money".

That seems like an entirely reasonable request to me?

Something being freely available does not inherently grant you the right to use it however you'd like. It's pretty unhelpful to conflate the two things.

You’re conflating a license to use something granted without charge and something actually free to the public. Licenses come with terms, public resources only come with social pressures of fair use.

It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.

I mean, a license to use something for free can still apply to something that is freely given? There's no conflation, since they're just different aspects of the same thing

And no, that's not unfair, that's absolutely within their rights, as the provider of said thing. What's unfair is willfully taking advantage of a free resource in ways that are explicitly against the reasons the provider is providing the thing in the first place. That's just place malice at that point.

After all, a license is just a social contact that can actually be enforced. I would argue the world would be a far better place if people didn't abuse the unenforceable nature of what you're calling "just a social contract".

> public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it

Because it prompts a serious question: why are taxpayers paying for this?

Why are taxpayers paying to enjoy the thing they paid for?

You just quoted that the public is using it - isn't that why we pay for it?

> the public is using it - isn't that why we pay for it?

For entertainment. I'm not saying it's a good reason. But I could absolutely see "why are we paying millions of dollars to fund someone's Tik Tok" play well in an election.

While you'll always find some people who don't think taxes should pay for anything ever in this case I think there's clear value in the DoT monitoring traffic volumes so the cameras already exist. It's not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online where the public can easily access them. The footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records.

> not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online

But there is a cost. If it’s not used by 90% of voters, and its trivially use is made known to 60% of them, you have the votes to reällocate those funds.

> footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records

They are a public record because we make them public. And taxpayers fund plenty of non-public information collection. That you wouldn’t vote for something doesn’t make it electoral impossible (nor even not good politics).

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