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?
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
