Please give me a choice not to use Google's reCaptcha

Question

I hate Google stealing book rights from authors and I do not want to help them doing so. I consider digitalization of books generally a good idea, but it should not be done with evilness and disrespect to authors as Google does it. I do not want to make this a Google vs anti-Google discussion and I respect anyone who wishes to help them and/or likes them, but I would like to be given a choice not to do so. If I was even more shameless I would wished that you give everyone information about reCaptcha before s/he fills it in (information that it is helping Google read books).

I feel that there are good arguments on both sides - helping/not helping Google with reCaptcha, so the right thing to do is to give a choice.

[edit] To be as constructive as possible, here is the list of possible alternatives:

• http://akismet.com/
• http://www.linksleeve.org/
• http://opencaptcha.com/
• http://mollom.com/
• http://defensio.com/

and many other exists.

Answer 1

As others have said, you might want to question your motives for this request.

But if you feel this strongly about it, there's actually a way to accomplish what you want. The basic idea of reCaptcha is this: The user is presented with two words (i.e. images) obtained from scanning an analog source. For one of the two images, it is already known which word it represents. For the other one, it's not.

Since only one word is known, obviously only the user's solution for this one word can be used to judge whether the captcha was solved. The user's solution to the other one is used to determine the correct word.

Let's look at an example:

You can see that the word "cabbage" looks easier to read for an OCR program than the word "beyond" (in particular, note the missing horizontal bar in the "e"), so you can assume reCaptcha already knows that the first word is "cabbage", but isn't sure about the second one.

So this word "beyond" will be presented to users solving reCaptchas all over the world, and if 95% of them type "beyond" into the box, reCaptcha can be pretty confident that the word actually is "beyond".

If it's your desire not to help them, just be one of the remaining 5% and don't enter "beyond". Entering

cabbage dontbeevil

into the box would still lead to the captcha being solved, because "cabbage" is correct. But they knew that already, so you haven't given them anything new.

All that said, I ask you again to inform yourself a little more about the background of reCaptcha and think about whether it might be a good thing after all to actually enter "beyond".

Answer 2

I hate Google stealing book rights from authors and I do not want to help them doing so.

You are incorrect. Copyright is granted to authors for a fixed period of time to encourage them to release their works knowing they will have a government sanctioned period of time during which they may gain profit from their work WHILE explicitly telling them that their work is meant to be a benefit to society in general.

If they do not wish to participate in copyright, they are able to do so simply by not publishing thier work.

Those who wish to both publish their work and know it will never be used without profit to them or their heirs should move to a country where they may realize their desire.

I do not want to make this google vs anti-google discussion

This is not about Google at all. This is about people deciding whether they believe that ideas, works, patents should have a limited period of exclusivity so that society can move forward together. Further, prior to the concept of copyright authors got nothing for their efforts, except what the Lords of their time paid them. Once people could easily and cheaply make copies of books, the authors appealed to the government to give them a period of time where they could make a living off each work. This encourages them to take on these endeavors, because otherwise there would have been no profit for them in the first place.

It is quite bold of you to suggest that authors should now be given government protection WITHOUT providing ANYTHING to the government (ie, society as a whole). Perhaps the system you'd like to see is copyright protection granted in perpetuity as long as they license their book with the government - pay a fee and get approval to publish the book. That seems to work out really well in countries big on censorship.

If you allow authors (or their companies) to forever hold their works, then you must allow patents the same benefit. In the same way that we enjoy indoor plumbing and medical remedies such as ibuprofen for pennies, the cultural growth we've achieved can only be obtained when schools can afford to reprint Dickens, Bach, etc.

That move is only one step away from banning libraries from lending out books - shouldn't the authors be paid everytime anyone reads any of their published words? The next step, of course, is banning second hand sales of books without paying a royalty.

It is shortsighted to believe that we, as a human race, can move forward and progress without sharing.

It truly boggles my mind how many people have such a basic misunderstanding as to the purpose of copyright law.

Answer 3

As a short-term solution, you could use the audio version of the captcha. As far as I know that uses only already free content.

Answer 4

Re-Captcha is an excellent bot discouragment system, which technically is leaps and bounds above any other known free system in terms of ease of use (ie, doesn't bother people too much) and correctness (ie, rejects bots more often than other systems).

If you have a good suggestion for a free alternative with similar ease of use and low rates of false positives and false negatives, I suspect that the SOFU owners and developers might be more inclined to offer a second option.