Note: THIS IS NOT MY SITE. I'm posting this here in the hopes of generating discussion about a pretty important topic.

A few sites exist specifically for breaking CAPTCHA's. These are known as "CAPTCHA farms" [1][2]. You can find a bunch of them on Google, but a few examples are DeathByCaptcha [3] and ImageDecoders [4]. These two sites charge about $1.35 per 1000 solved CAPTCHA's.

This is a relatively well known industry, but most of the articles I've seen only talk about the demand side of the market. Nobody has bothered to find the sites paying the suppliers to type the CAPTCHA's. So today I did a little bit of research and was able to find one.

MegaTypers [5] pays its users to solve CAPTCHA's. Signing up is kind of difficult because you need to track down an invitation code, so I took some screenshots and put them in an album for anyone interested, including pricing table, CAPTCHA entry, and statistics board. [6]

When typing CAPTCHA's, I was limited by the speed they were offered to me (hence the ability to buy "boost packs," I presume). In 60 seconds, I was able to type 12 CAPTCHA's, 11 of them accurately. Assuming I sustained this rate for an hour, I would type roughly 700 CAPTCHA's.

Assuming average price of $0.65/1000 (it varies by hour), I would earn 45 cents. In an 8 hour day, that's $3.60.

CAPTCHA farms are making a profit of roughly $500 per day.

I'm wondering: What does the (largely libertarian) userbase of HN think of this?

Note: I ran into the character limit, so will post more in a comment.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/technology/26captcha.html?_r=0

[2] http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/09/captchas-flummox-bots-but-may-be-doomed-by-captcha-farmers/

[3] http://deathbycaptcha.com/

[4] http://www.imagedecoders.com

[5] http://www.megatypers.com/

[6] http://imgur.com/a/QevOc

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country