Comment by try_the_bass
14 days ago
> which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it
I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone.
Since no single player could replicate this outcome based on only their data, does it not imply that there's value created from collecting (and incentivizing collection of) the data, and subsequently processing it to create something?
It actually seems more unfair to demand the collective result for yourself, when your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place.
I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.
Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?
“Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?”
Bad analogy. I pay a farmer (directly or indirectly) for the vegetable. It’s a simple, understood, transaction. These players were generally unaware that they were gathering data for Niantic in this way.
If data is crowdsourced it should belong to the crowd.
Niantic pays you for the data you collect, as well. It might pay you with in-game rewards, but if you accept those rewards, this is, as you put it, "a simple, understood transaction".
The farmers you buy the vegetables from are also generally unaware of how you use them, too!
I fail to see how you're differentiating the analogy from the original example.
Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.
Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.
The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.
> Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.
Sure, copying it is approximately free. But using it provides value, and sharing the model dilutes the value of its usage. The fact that it's free to copy doesn't mean it's free to share. The value of the copy that Niantic uses will be diluted by every copy they make and share with someone else.
> Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.
Your second sentence does not logically follow from the first. In fact, your first sentence is an excellent example of the point I was making: many people contribute to open-source projects, and the value of the vast majority of those contributions on their own do not amount to the sum total value of the projects they've contributed to. This is what I meant by "your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place". Sure, many people contribute to open source projects to make them what they are, but in the vast majority of cases, any individual contributor on their own would be unable to create those same projects.
To rephrase your first sentence: the value of the whole is greater than the value of the parts. There is value in putting all the pieces together in the right way, and that value should rightfully be allocated to those who did the synthesis, not to those who contributed the parts.
Is a canvas-maker entitled to every painting produced on one of their canvasses? Without the canvas the painting would not exist--but merely producing the canvas does not make it into a painting. The value is added by the artist, not the canvas-maker--therefore the value for the produced art should mostly go to the artist, not the canvas-maker. The canvas maker is compensated for the value of the canvas itself (which isn't much), and is entitled to nothing beyond.
> The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.
There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point. Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.
You’re getting really confused here. Nobody is arguing about stuff being worth more than the sum of its parts. That’s obvious to everyone who has watched literally anything useful being constructed out of materials.
You using that as some kind of support for Niantic’s actions doesn’t make any sense.
> There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point.
What you’re ignoring is the reality of people getting angry when they contribute something under a premise and then it gets used for something else. When I contribute to a charity that is supposed to build water supply systems and they decide to build pipe bombs instead, I’m gonna be pretty pissed off.
> Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.
The collective that produced literally all of the input can ask for the model and then easily copy it to each member. If a single person produced all of the input and then requested this, how much does your argument change? Because these scenarios are equivalent when the product isn’t rivalrous.
More generally, you’re still not grokking non-rivalrous goods. A good isn’t non-rivalrous just because artificially constraining it and selling access to it can make it profitable. This confusion has led you multiple times to comparing this model to physical goods.
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People who think like this and want to profit off you with KPIs is why players should always maliciously comply with data grabs. Spend the 30 seconds activating the accelerometer and doing sweeps of your shoes and full finger covers of the surroundings to get those poffins and rare candies. It's gross that lately they want to give me 10 pokeballs now instead.
If some small number maliciously comply like this, it will make the model better, not worse.
This is also wildly antisocial behavior, and if everyone behaved like this, the world would be a really shit place. I know many people have a genuine "fuck you, I got mine" attitude, but if everyone had it, the world would be infinitely worse off.
If you don't like the terms of the game, don't play it? Why does dislike of the terms merit what essentially amounts to cheating (under the spirit of the rules, if not the letter)? This attitude makes even less sense than the one I was originally critiquing
What you say is fair but if an individual's data doesn't matter, what happens when they ask to have their data deleted under GDPR. is there a way to demux their data from existing models?
GDPR isn't a magic spell. It's only relevant for personally-identifiable data: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/
While your example isn't exactly coherent (I don't think GDPR would cover photos/videos taken by the user, unless maybe the user was in the photo/video?), presumably they could just train the model again without that user's data. I doubt the end result would be that much different
> Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?
This is more like paying the farmhands.
If we're looking at my work output, eh, everyone that works on a copyrighted thing gets a personal license to it? That sounds like it would work out okay.
> I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.
It depends on how directly the data is tied to the output. This seems pretty direct.
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Niantic was clear about the product of the labor: In exchange for swiping the PokeStop, you'd get the rewards. No one was ever told they'd get more than that, and no one had any reasonable expectation that they'd get more.
Exactly! Everyone thought that the exchange was them doing something in the game, and Niantic was giving them the rewards in the game, and no one had any reasonable expectation that Niantic would get more outside of the game. (After all, neither Blizzard or Square get anything when one completes quest objectives in their MMO.)
So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.
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Expectations are often unreasonable from some perspective. It's not difficult to see why users are upset.
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> I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.
What labor, though? They took a few pictures and videos (hell, they probably still have a copy of them, so giving a copy to Niantic is essentially free), and were generally compensated for doing that (through in-game rewards, but compensated nonetheless).
The "labor" that transformed the many players' many bits of data was done by Niantic, and thus I would argue that Niantic is the rightful beneficiary of any value that could not be generated by any individual player. To my earlier point, every player could retain a copy of every photo/video they submitted to Niantic, and still be unable to produce this model from it.
> This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.
The players are also compensated for their submissions, are they not? It doesn't matter that it's not with "real money", in-game rewards are still compensation.
If you agree that a farmer is not entitled to any (much less all!) of your work output because they contributed to feeding you, you agree that the players are not entitled to the models produced by Niantic.
Maybe I'd accept the argument that a player might be entitled to the model generated by training on _only_ that player's data, but I think we'd agree that would be a pretty worthless model.
The value comes from the work Niantic put in to collate the data and build the model. Someone who contributed a tiny fragment of the training data isn't entitled to any of that added value (much less all of it, as the OP was seeming to demand), just like a farmer isn't entitled to any of your work output (much less all of it!) by contributing a fragment of your caloric intake.
Let's compare apples to oranges then:
You grew apples, I grew oranges.
Are you entitled to my oranges just because you grew apples?
If I mapped the area around my home, am I entitled to your efforts in mapping other areas of the world?