Get Rewarded for Reporting Plagiarism on Steemit
Have you ever worked an hour or more on an article, video, or blog post only to turn around and find that somebody has stolen your work and posted it as their own? This happened to me yesterday and it got me thinking about what we can do as a community to stop it.
I posted a video on my Steemit blog called An In-Depth Steemit Review for Beginners and it quickly became a Hot topic under the Steemit and Dtube categories. This means it got a lot of attention and a lot of views, which in turn made me quite a bit of money. So I wasn't totally surprised to see that somebody had stolen my work (verbatim) and was trying to pass it as his own.
After I noticed the theft of my work, I flagged the blog and left a comment for the user letting him know that my work was protected by copyright and he should remove it immediately. But I wasn't going to stop there. I started doing some research to find out what the community as a whole was doing to combat this theft. This also got me wondering how I would ever know if somebody else was posting original work or not. The last thing I want to do is upvote a plagiarized article.
I found some solutions...
What is SteemCleaners
The @steemcleaners group was created to make Steemit a better place for all of us. They help us to fight spam, plagiarism, identity theft/deception, Malware/Virus/Phishing and other Attack Vectors, and can even detect spun articles. And they will also reward you for reporting these things. How awesome is that!?
See their latest SteemCleaner Report at:
https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/steemcleaner-report-for-december-16-2017
How Do I Report Plagiarism to SteemCleaners?
This is easy. Go to their website at https://steemcleaners.org/abuse-report/ and fill out the form there. Be sure to include the link to your original work in the Details section so they can compare your article with the one being reported. They worked very fast to take down the article that I reported and the user will not receive payout from copying my work.
How Do I Know if Another Article Is Plagiarized?
Another cool tool that I found is @originalworks. When you make a comment on your post (or anybody else's for that matter) and put the username @originalworks, the OriginalWorks bot will determined whether the post your commenting on is in fact original work and not copied. I'll post in the comments of this article so that you can see for yourself how this works.
I like to do this on my own articles so that my readers know that they get original content when they're reading my blog.
@originalworks
The @OriginalWorks bot has determined this post by @brandonfrye to be original material and upvoted it!
To call @OriginalWorks, simply reply to any post with @originalworks or !originalworks in your message!
Useful information and always appreciated, thank you.
This post has received a 5.35 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @brandonfrye.
Steemcleaners do a great job, but I want people to be more aware of photo plagiarism too. I have just written a blog about it, but Steemcleaners accepts ANY source when uploading a photo. It is plagiarism to list the incorrect source, but I would say that apart from Pixabay shots, the source of the rest is probably 99% incorrectly reported. I would love to see that change.