I agree with you. I don't think we should completely shun or ban by downvote content that is not 100% original. But a disclaimer would be very nice. The possibility to have an advance feature in the "canonical" would have the search engines actually giving us a thumbs up for pointing back to the original piece of content.

This way, people who already spent hundreds of hours working on content may be finally able to monetize it without hurting the rankings of Steemit.com.