Thanks Amanda! I really appreciate your perspective and love the points you make regarding remixing of ideas and what goes into creating content in general. What I'm trying to find is an efficient way to navigate the very large grey area between doing nothing, ostracizing/shaming, and physical retaliation.

so long as the person using it didn't MAKE A CLAIM they created it themselves.

But is that claim implied on Steemit? For text, I think it is (otherwise, we should use a blockquote as I did above). But what about for images? What if someone did create custom digital art for every post. Would we want to know that and would that impact our appreciation of the overall creative work? (See interactions @klye has had for examples of how this has already been a problem.)

However, with the world wide web, information sharing is like its own ether, and finding and crediting everyone for everything on every level absorbs a lot of valuable time for others.

It is, but when the whales upvote stuff they assume is legit, they get into big trouble with the community if it is not. If we can't assume content not cited is original, the burden is then shifted on them to check everything first. That's why I think the author doing that work up front (citing original authors) not only helps the entire community save time, it signals "I'm a cooperator who cares about valuable contributions" which benefits everyone from a game theory perspective.

Images are a tricky aspect of it because, outside of the #photography channel, they aren't (usually) a core part of the content piece. As with most things, it's our assumptions that bite us. :)