alt Hacker News> 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.
I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.
> Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?
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.
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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?
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.