Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

Just for clarity on this comment and a separate one, Niantic is a Google spin out company and appears to still be majority shareholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.#As_an_independen...

which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

All of which I've directly contributed to and never (directly) recieved anything in return

To be fair, you received a service for free that you may have otherwise had to pay for. I'm not saying it's just, but to say you didn't get anything in return is disingenuous.

The connection is a ship, built in Connecticut, which brought gold rushers to San Francisco and was run aground and converted to a hotel there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic_(whaling_vessel)

The company was named after the ship.

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?

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.

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.

Not saying you are saying this but it amused me how many people believe(d) that Apple wasn’t mining and hoarding location data either because well, they’re Apple and they love you. All those traffic statuses in Apple Maps on minor side streets with no monitoring came from the … traffic fairy, perhaps.

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.

(And I don't even mean only that it complies with the exact wording of the fine print that nobody reads anyway, but also that everyone expects the terms-and-conditions to say that the company owns all the data. So no surprises to anyone.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.

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?

Absolutely not.

If you are compensated for doing something, you can’t suddenly come back for more 5 years later because it was used as part of something bigger which is now making money.

I have little sympathy for the players here. If you are voluntarily doing free work for worthless virtual things, you can’t come complaining when it dawns on you that it might have been dumb from the start (and to be fair maybe it wasn’t and they did it because it was fun which is completely ok).

I guess we could ban in game shop and game reward for real work as they are somehow predatory but that would be a bit paternalistic.