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What a bizarre lawsuit. Even if the CAPTCHA required 30 mins of work for a free gmail account and that work was used for significant gain for Google only, why w

What a bizarre lawsuit. Even if the CAPTCHA required 30 mins of work for a free gmail account and that work was used for significant gain for Google only, why would you be entitled to compensation?

tyingq 11y ago
Not that I agree with it, but the premise is this... - reCaptcha presents 2 words for the end user to solve - the purpose of the second word has nothing to do with security. The word itself is not known to Google. - the "fraud" is that Google is deceiving you into helping them decipher the second word for their own financial gain (paraphrasing from http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1904&context=historical http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...) Edit: Please note that I am not in agreement with the premise above...just trying to summarize it.
- comex 11y ago
  Not mentioned is that it actually does have something to do with security, because once enough users have transcribed a word, in addition to it being returned to the digitization project, it can be used for future CAPTCHAs as a known word. According to Wikipedia, this was at least historically the case for reCAPTCHA.
- cptskippy 11y ago
  What exactly constitutes fraud? The captcha interface (http://www.captcha.net/ http://www.captcha.net/) has a clickable tagline "stop spam. read books." that takes you to an explanation of what it is and how it works. Are we saying that fraud is not going out of your way to carefully explain exactly what you're doing as you're doing it? Saying that Captchas are in any way misleading or fraudulent calls into question "free" software paid for by ads, any app that has a ToS contract, pretty much every financial agreement on the planet, most repair shops, and just about anywhere else that you agree to something without 100% ELI5 in your face explanation before you pull the trigger.
- pbnjay 11y ago
  Fraud generally requires that the victim rely on the "fradulent" statement to decide to move forward (e.g. solving the captcha). So even if you assume that the terms "free" and "security" were intentionally meant to deceive, you'd have to prove that the user would not have otherwise signed up for Gmail if those labels had been different.
cptskippy 11y ago
The argument probably hinges on Google's use of the word free. If it actually went forward then we'd probably see the end of the use of the term "free" and start seeing "Ad supported" or "task supported" as labels instead.

What a bizarre lawsuit. Even if the CAPTCHA required 30 mins of work for a free gmail account and that work was used for significant gain for Google only, why would you be entitled to compensation?

tyingq 11y ago

Not that I agree with it, but the premise is this... - reCaptcha presents 2 words for the end user to solve - the purpose of the second word has nothing to do with security. The word itself is not known to Google. - the "fraud" is that Google is deceiving you into helping them decipher the second word for their own financial gain (paraphrasing from http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1904&context=historical http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...) Edit: Please note that I am not in agreement with the premise above...just trying to summarize it.

comex 11y ago
Not mentioned is that it actually does have something to do with security, because once enough users have transcribed a word, in addition to it being returned to the digitization project, it can be used for future CAPTCHAs as a known word. According to Wikipedia, this was at least historically the case for reCAPTCHA.
cptskippy 11y ago
What exactly constitutes fraud? The captcha interface (http://www.captcha.net/ http://www.captcha.net/) has a clickable tagline "stop spam. read books." that takes you to an explanation of what it is and how it works. Are we saying that fraud is not going out of your way to carefully explain exactly what you're doing as you're doing it? Saying that Captchas are in any way misleading or fraudulent calls into question "free" software paid for by ads, any app that has a ToS contract, pretty much every financial agreement on the planet, most repair shops, and just about anywhere else that you agree to something without 100% ELI5 in your face explanation before you pull the trigger.
pbnjay 11y ago
Fraud generally requires that the victim rely on the "fradulent" statement to decide to move forward (e.g. solving the captcha). So even if you assume that the terms "free" and "security" were intentionally meant to deceive, you'd have to prove that the user would not have otherwise signed up for Gmail if those labels had been different.

cptskippy 11y ago

The argument probably hinges on Google's use of the word free. If it actually went forward then we'd probably see the end of the use of the term "free" and start seeing "Ad supported" or "task supported" as labels instead.