RE: Fake news - Plagiarism and taking things out of context
I'm 100% behind cleaning up Steemit although I'm slightly concerned that there's a growing zealotry trend.
I think people should be very careful with this Copy/Paste tagline that's doing the rounds. You are perfectly entitled to copy-n-paste any of your own work from any of your own sources including websites and or other social media accounts. Just check out the likes of @sweetsssj sheesh's she takes cross posting to whole new level!
You are perfectly entitled to copy-n-paste works licensed under Creative Commons depending on how it is licensed and by adhering to its accreditation rules. Then there is work that is in the Public Domain which you are perfectly entitled to use as-is or modified. In some cases you may even copy and use Copyrighted material.
I see two issues which actually Steemit fails on.
- People should be made to give accreditation where necessary. i.e. if the source requires accreditation then you should give it.
- While a bot is clever enough to find duplicate content on the web it's not clever enough to determine how the source is licensed.
Now obviously if we're talking plagiarism within Steemit that's a whole different ballgame. To be honest I don't even know what the licensing is for content posted on Steemit. I'm wondering if the steemit source code is based on an MIT license then I suspect posts will be CC (Creative Commons) or something like that although there's no reason it cannot be copyright.
I myself found a duplicate post this morning by supposedly two different accounts. The thing is I don't have the skillset to determine if, in fact, the two accounts belong to the same person or not. If they do then that's not plagiarism or copy-n-paste that's just greed. Personally, I'd far rather turn this stuff over to @sherlockholmes or @steemcleaners or even @spaminator although they are more concerned with a whole different problem.
You bring up excellent points @dickturpin. Copy/pasting your own content is ofcourse perfectly fine. That's how I started out on Steemit aswell, by using the recipes I had already posted on my Wordpress blog. In this case though, I would simply state at the bottom that it was taken from my site (with a link). I would also reply to Cheetah's comments by telling her it was my own work. There wasn't much of a problem there.
I don't really know what the licensing is for content on Steemit either! I wonder (and I'm no expert on this at all) if simply writing at the bottom of each post "My work is not to be copied and/or used without my permission" or something of the sorts would be enough...
Ofcourse, legal points aside, there is also some human decency to which we should adhere. This standard is different to anyone, but I think most people here would agree that posting someone else's content as if it were made by yourself is a pretty crappy thing to do. Steemit is basically policed by its users, so whichever license any content might fall under, people can still flag a user if they don't actually cite their source. I think this would go for your example. Whether it was copy/pasted from a different person or it was just someone being greedy, posting on two accounts, people are free to flag this user for it to show him/her that they don't feel it's okay to do this.
Anyway, either way, posting actual plagiarised content (like using a random picture someone found online), could get people into trouble if the content is protected by some form of copywrite. That would be a shame to happen, especially since we can't edit our old posts, so we can't rectify those mistakes.
Both the back end blockchain service (steemd) and the front end (condenser) are MIT licensed. However, the licensing of the software used is not relevant in terms of content posted. Steemit's legal jurisdiction is in the US and as such is subject to copyright infringement claims, aka DMCA takedown requests. We can't modify what gets posted to the blockchain but can be legally abliged to filter content that gets displayed from the front end web site. This is not censorship, it's just law within the jurisdiction that the front end website is hosted.