Recaptcha was not a free service. It was provided a free service[0] (search free). I'm pretty sure that no one in this conversation is saying that the cost to

Recaptcha was not a free service. It was provided a free service[0] (search free). I'm pretty sure that no one in this conversation is saying that the cost to run the service is free, and arguing such is a strawman. was not developed for public domain works. pilot project was to digitize the NYT archives While the original "recaptcha.net" website is no longer available online (even via archive.org). There are plenty of sources still available that bely this claim. that will help convert printed text into computer-readable letters on behalf of the Internet Archive[0]. The team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive[1]. "There's still about 100 million books to be digitised, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete - Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon"[1]. The sources are from 2007, when recaptcha was first introduced. There are more, but I picked the first two by going back to the beginning of the wikipedia entry for recaptcha and looking at the supplied sources. This is before Google bought it in 2009. While I can't speak for anyone else, this is what I mean when I say "original" recaptcha. laugh at your suggestion that Google could "pay a group of people to do". They got a group of people to do it for free, which implies (barring salaries) that they could also get a group of people to do it for not-free. Thus the argument that people don't want to work for Google for free. Google hadn't learned from massive user data And when Google has met it's ML goals and decides it gets no further benefit from recaptcha? Remember, it's not a free-to-run service. They only continue it as long as they benefit. If recaptcha shuts down, it would have been nicer to have the fruits of that work available through something like the Internet Archive, than something like Google Books. [0] - http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/May/may24_recaptcha.shtml http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/May/may24_recaptcha.sht... [1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm