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RE: A Wave
I would disagree. It is not unethical if the original artist gives up the rights to their art and then someone uses it without attributing. The CC0 license does grant that freedom. I'd say it's unethical to claim otherwise.
That said, there is one thing I find very questionable about @greentomorrow, and that is comment spamming. If you check his comments you'll find that he's spamming the same message over and over on different blogs. That's perhaps the most unethical thing this guy is doing right now.
It is certainly the most irritating thing @greentomorrow is doing. But I agree with @jacobtothe. Even if it were legal to use pictures in the public domain or under the CC0 license, it would be the responsible thing to do to attribute any works to the author even if said author did not require attribution. It is normally assumed that any work not attributed to someone else, is the publisher's own work.
But the license explicitly states that you don't have to, so there is no legal nor ethical reason to. Claiming that there is, is nitpicking at best. I personally don't like CC0 and definitely wouldn't use but I can't stop others from using it. It's too bad, but that license does kind of blow the whole "it's unethical" claim out of the water.
In a way, the CC0 seems like it was purposely designed to end the whole ethics discussion. We just can't claim something like posting a piece of art is unethical if it was expressly permitted by its author with no unclear terms. Of course it sucks and it definitely undermines the moral rights clauses of copyright itself.
I don't like it any more than you guys do, and I'm saying that the CC0 really should be legally contested for that very reason, that it actually undermines copyright law. If it is left unchallenged, we'll very possibly end up with no legal or moral stance to stand on.
I'll add that in Finland, the CC0 isn't actually legally binding. Here by law, we can't just denounce or sell our moral rights ("isyysoikeus") to an artwork, but only the monetary and/or publishing rights.
Unless the author wants to keep their name unknown (anonymous), the "fatherhood" (that is the maker's name) of the artwork must be kept alongside the work of art.
Not being legally required to do something is different from having no ethical or social obligation to do it.
My position in this ethics debate is in need of clarification. There are three parties here: the author, the publisher and the audience, out of which only two, namely, the publisher and the audience are relevant in case the work is in the public domain or published under CC0.
What the unethical thing that I'm talking about is is lying by omission for monetary gain. Because it is normally tacitly assumed that any work published without attribution is a creation of the publisher, failing to mention that the work is not one's own is unethical - in the context of blog posts on Steem. That the work was published under CC0 or in the public domain only takes the author out of the equation.
Nobody is saying it is unethical to post a piece of art if the owner of its copyrights permits it. What I think is unethical is misleading the audience into thinking that the work is one's own. In my opinion, it is perfectly fine to post images, video, texts or any works of art created by other people if a) copyrights do not forbid it and b) one does not attempt to take credit for them. Taking credit for someone else's work and benefiting from that is the issue here in my opinion. That is an issue between the audience and the publisher in this case.
In some cases there is no dilemma if the work is well-known enough for it to be unlikely to be assumed to be an original work by the publisher.
But I don't think anyone has the moral right to do a simple Google search for photographs in the public domain or published under CC0, publish them in a blog on Steem without attribution or mentioning that the photographs are not one's own work, have people praise one's photographic skills and upvote the posts with abandon.
The comment spam is certainly a bigger problem from @greentomorrow, but there is indeed a wider problem of plagiarism on Steemit. Ethical posting has two basic principles:
I can let the occasional uncredited image embed from a newcomer slide, but when the entire post is an image that is clearly not original content, we have a serious problem on the level of a cut-and-paste article repost.
True, but using that image in any way, even without attributing it to the one saying you don't need to attribute kind of goes against the whole "no attribution needed" clause.
I am not saying the CC0 is a good license, I personally use CC-By, and for a very good reason: The CC0 undermines copyright, and all the other licenses by making them irrelevant, if CC0 is deemed legal. I mean how can anyone claim copying is unethical if the artist expressly permits copying without attribution? It is a paradox we don't want to see. The question "How do we question anyone for plagiarism if CC0 is legal?" comes to mind.
Yes, I think it's a bad license, but I can't prevent anyone from using it. Unless they are Finns, then the law prevents them from fully giving their moral rights away. CC0 or Public Domain, it doesn't matter, the moral rights are non-transferable, and the CC0 isn't binding here. Public Domain is, but only so-and-so years after the author's death.
If you publish work X under CC0, it has no bearing on the copyrights that apply to any other works by you or anyone else. It does not undermine copyrights in any general sense. You can still release other works under any license you see fit.
As I said in an other post, I'm of the opinion that if someone tried to pass off works created by other people that are in the public domain as their own by explicitly saying so or allowing people to believe that, that would be unethical even if it were legal and did not violate any copyright laws.
I do not care one whit about legality. Legality does not define morality. We are talking personal, ethical behavior. Laws are arbitrary, fluid dictates. Right and wrong are universal and reciprocal principles when properly understood.
If you want to get into copyright law and licenses, check out Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella.