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

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.

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.

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.