Avoiding Plagiarism in your Graphics

Why I really did not read novels was because they put a lot of efforts in the plot and wording but often did not have enough pictures for me as a visual learner.
I guess they did not get the saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words" whereas a well planned graphical illustration is more than double the worth of a picture.
For a post here on Steemit to attain the status of quality post, the story line needs a corresponding graphical illustration that helps express the main idea with few words. So we really need pictures, illustrations, graphics or whatever other names are used to discribe it.

Due to their value, pictures, graphics and other forms of illustrations available online are not free for you to grap and use at will. They are often protected by layer upon layers of copyright and intellectual property protection laws.

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You can get a lawsuit for using such pictures or graphics without paying or getting proper authorisation. It is so serious that giving attributions alone without getting a license will still put you in deep trouble if you were using it for fun on your blog and multiply that by three if you are using it here on Steemit to make some money.

Pictures from the public domain can be used here on steemit as long as we honestly make attributions to the source. This simply means that you can use these pictures on one condition that you will openly acknowledge that they are not your pictures. You can use images from depositories like - Wikimedia Commons

• Unsplash
• Pixabay
• Shutterstock
• Pexels
• Flickr Commons
• Old Book Illustrations
• SpaceX flickr
• Foodies
• Creative Commons

If after getting a picture or graphic from this "free" sites, using it without any attribution is considered as graphic plagiarism. Any image on your Steemit blog without any attribution as a caption means you are claiming it as yours indicating that you either captured the picture or created it yourself. Which leads us to the issue of edited pictures from such depositories.

Customized graphics are often more suitable, adding more value to the post. But who has intellectual property rights over the resulting image and what happens to attributions. The answer is simple. The resulting image belongs to the person who edited it. But for using components that are not his, he must give attributions to the source of any and all such components.
This is an area where a lot of Steemians are often found wanting. Once they edit a picture, they failed to acknowledge the source of the elements they borrowed from others to create the graphic.

I will be using this thumbnail picture for an example, it was created with the help of PhotoStudio using three main components, the background came from unsplash

_{Photo credit to unsplash}

While the little girl and her trainer in the thumbnail came from another free depository known as pexels.com and cropping was done using the removebg online application.

_{Photo credit to Pexels}

The arrangements and accompanied text that resulted in this thumbnail came from PhotoStudio.

_{Created by manuelhooks ∆Pexels ∆Unsplash}

To be free from plagiarism, all contributors of the various components in the graphic work must be acknowledged. If no attributions are made, it is the equivalent of a Mosaic Plagiarism. If one contributor is left out, it's like getting bread, candy and eggs from a shop. If we should squeeze the candy into the bread and only pay for the bread and egg while the candy is hiding in the bread, that is not honesty.
Avoiding Plagiarism means being honest with the intellectual property in our possession, not taking credit for things we did not create and making it clear where we borrowed it from.
So you can't just put a caption that says "edited with pixellab" on a graphic that contains borrowed elements from other persons. It will only be appropriate if you own all the elements that makes up the final work.

Online materials are best refered using hyperlinks. This will help ease the verification process and give the reader the opportunity to make futher reading. If you are taking a picture from another post on steemit, it is only appropriate that you give all attributions. That applies to reusing contest organizer's thumbnail picture. If you are not sure, look around the picture for the copyright logo ©, or the text around the picture should give you a hint. If the picture Is smeared with some kind of watermark, then it is to be avoided. And Pictures from a newspaper are often no-go areas. So If you are not sure, then don't use it. Infringement on a copyright protected picture or graphic can lead to very expensive lawsuits especially for persons using the pictures for anything that might generate financial revenue.

The aggrieved party often drags both the user and the website to court over the case of intellectual property rights infringement.
Offender often go down with heavy fines levied as punishment and imprisonment or both. And the court may demand that the site be brought down.

The lawsuit involving hope by shepard fairey is a case of an edited photo of president Obama
_unsplash.com

This is the best sample of the hope poster I could get that is usable under the creative Commons license from unsplash.com you can follow this link on Wikipedia to see the poster and this other link to see the source picture that was edited.

Another outstanding lawsuit involving visual plagiarism is the Silkscreen printing by Andy Warhol

Can I reuse a contest thumbnail on steemit?

Yes
If the thumbnail has a creative Commons license from unsplash.com, pixabay e.t.c or is available on the public domain, you can use it and give attributions to the site and artist

No
If the steemit user hosting the contest has made any significant editing on the graphic, the resulting graphics is his, and is protected under intellectual property rights and can only be used if granted permission. Your fellow Steemians do not need to make any special documents to get this rights. it's an automatic right.∆
Note that a correct attribution alone in this case will not free you from plagiarism.

• Plagiarism in photography
• plagiarism in design
• Probation over Obama ‘Hope’ poster
• Legally Using Google Images
• Digital art copyright

Media Credit

Captured with	Nokia C30
Captured by	@manuelhooks
Edited with	PhotoStudio App
Cropped with	removeBg
Photo Credit	¥Unsplash ∆Pexels ∆Unsplash
For Verification	My Achievement 1 Link
To view links	Use Edge or Chrome for better results

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