RE: Does Steemit count as commercial usage of content?
I'm not saying that copyright laws are dead. But I think that they should be very strongly improved upon. Right now, they are, from my point of view, obsolete, still living in the era of paper books and paintings. It's controversial, but imagine things like being unable to "copy" something. Copying, on the era of the internet, is within the reach of your right click. You just right click on the image, press copy, then go to Facebook, press paste, and you have a new copy of the content 😂 very pretty and very illegal.
The fact is you are earning something and may it be fiat or cryptocurrency there was an exchange that happened.
The laws of commerce and copyright are usually defined for exchanges, as you say, but in this case, I'm just blogging about something. Blogs were born from a form of topical diaries. Things like what scientists use to record their progress, or to write about interesting things they see in their midst. Sort of similar to the letters that your dad used to send you.
And on Steem, you get paid. But it's not the users who are paying you, and you're not selling your content, you're not receiving something "in exchange" for it. The money you get here is very different from the money stipulated in copyright laws. And this is where I think that their obsolescence lies. The system here is very complex, but we could say that you are being paid to be here and to participate, regardless of the content. And people vote for you to receive money for your participation.
However, the participation on the Steem blockchain differs from the classical commercial model. I'm sure we could compare both of them and try to pinpoint certain similarities, but in essence, Steem is a social network and money is generated, printed, on this same platform. It's just different and deserves a level of analysis that I'm currently unable to perform. But I think that, at least for the case of my blog and similar blogs, the use given to the pictures shouldn't fall within the "commercial use" category but "personal" or other categories of copyright that perhaps haven't been invented yet for memes and virtual sharing.
Okay so would you decline pay outs for all of your posts from now on?
No, and I don't see how that would make sense? Imagine Steem, as I said on the other comment, like this:
This is not a company or a market, or an art gallery with entry fees. It's just a place where we hang out and the owners of the place have a money printer. We hang out here and it's nice and cozy, and whenever we interact and someone says "Oooh! That's cool!", the owners put some of their specially-made tokens in that person's assigned basket.
We keep walking around, seeing and chatting, and it's just like anywhere else, only that in here, you're getting money every time you walk out. You may show people pictures of your trips, our you may open up an album that you bought somewhere else and show those pictures, like "Hey, there's this Rubikon author that I love, look what he made", and dozens of people stand around you wondering what you're going to share. Then you open it and it's awesome, it's not yours, and you're not authorised to resell it, but people gawk at it and "Oooh" around in awe, and the owners add a little bit more cash to your basket.
And so you get paid for it
Yes, but it's not a commercial exchange. You're not selling the pictures or anything.
I think it's more like sharing and the payment is a secondary effect of the interaction that could not be considered to be commercial use of the content itself.
I see Steem like its own ecosystem. Imagine that what I described is just a group of your friends and, well, you have a money printer for your own currency, and if you're a good citizen, your friends say "my friend is a cool friend" and you get bumped up.
Does that mean that when you're busy being a good citizen, showing your finds in the form of pictures, treasures and stories, you're somehow reselling the content?
So if Steem is its own ecosystem then it shouldn't be bound by universal rights and laws of government? So the work of all spammers and plagiarist that would get a poem, a short story or an image from the internet is okay and since it was just shared and the secondary effect was someone upvoted on it thus giving them cash is okay since there was a money printer.
So the work of Steem cleaners is wrong and they should be called out for flagging and reducing plagiarism because it is just being shared and without the intent to resell and get money? So Steem Cleaners is evil, another form of the government and banksters to limit people and herd them towards staying in line.
No, we also have the right to disagree with rewards, and so we can flag.
My point about the ecosystem wasn't that it is completely independent of the world. What I meant was that this isn't a company or anything like that. It's an ecosystem with forests with leaves made of silver and fruits made of gold, and the fact that you're walking around with an album of pictures that you can't resell doesn't mean that you should't go to the elders and say "I found this cool thing by the river" right before asking for permission to take a tiny fruit that you could sell afterwards.
Steemit.Inc is very much a company! It is registered and based in the USA and is bound by the laws of the USA, like it or not. There is this strange belief that Steemit Is the Blockchain. It is not. It is a for-profit website that uses the Blockchain.
https://www.steem.center/index.php?title=Steemit,_Inc
Under US copyright law, my work is protected whether you like it, or agree with it or not! You can't change the fact that I have rights under the law to protect my work, and that you have no rights under the law to take it.
I know, lol! I've never said the opposite. I'm very familiar with the Steem-based services such as Steemit, Busy, etc.
And I agree with the protections! You should get every protection you can get and fight to make those protections grow until they assure you the best system possible to be a creator and a publisher. This can only stimulate creators as it improves, and I'm all for that.
You sound like I'm saying "you shouldn't have rights!". You should have all these rights and much more. In this world, self-interest is what gets you the most profit, so yeah, go get everything you can out of everything you make and you'll be getting much more than if you go the charitable way.
And I forgot about what you said about Steemcleaners.
I think that this is more a matter of 2 things: ethics and perceived due reward.
We have votes and we have flags. We can use any of them any time we want. I could flag you right now, lol, or upvote you, and it all depends on my personal beliefs. This is my moral standpoint, and communities have ethical standpoints.
(Ethics are community-based while morals are culturally imposed and individual; ethics are like guidelines while morals are beliefs.)
Steemcleaners enforce a view of ethics that they believe in, as everyone has the right to do. And their view is shared by many people, so it's "ok" (it's accepted by the local instance of society). For Steemcleaners, it's bad to share pictures and texts and to imply that you're the owner and maker of them. If you make a text and use an illustrative picture that is very obviously not yours and you don't say that it's yours, then you can be safe from Steemcleaners. And this is "common sense" (it's the ethical view of the local instance of society).
Every community has regulators and authorities. Steem is no exception.
In the Steem design, one of the instances in which people were encouraged to flag others was when they disagreed on the rewards they were getting. If you get 0.02 from copying my post, I can just flag you and you get 0. It's my self-enforcement of the reward system, just as it was designed.
Then people who are not in Steemit but had their work taken and used would not have the mechanism to flag someone so they cannot complain?
Steemcleaners operating on what is Ethically and morally right based on copyright law that majority of countries follow and thus is the right thing to do goes after people using parts and images from other other people so why would it be difficult to attribute and source then?
I don't think so as I have seen posts that Steemcleaners or other people report such instances and a warning goes up.
So here you are exercising your right to copyright then
Lol, I'm not complaining about that. Flag them away! Destroy the plagiarists!
Well, if you don't know the source, Qurator says you shouldn't post the image, but I say you should just say "Hey, I don't know the source".
In fact, if you know the source, but it's not free to use, Qurator says you should not use it. I say you should just use it and try to find the author to attribute it to. Support them if you can. But don't think that you can't share something just because it's not allowed for commercial use.
I'm all for enforcing plagiarism rules.
I haven't seen that. I'd have to look it up. As far as I'm concerned, if it's obvious it's not yours and you don't imply that it's yours, then you shouldn't get retribution for seeming crimes.
I'm against plagiarism. I'm not against posting a poem that I found, saying "hey, there's this author called Richard Goldmann who wrote this poem and I like it, I'll put it here". Commercial-use copyright laws would be against it, though, and would claim that I'm copying unlicensed work for commercial purposes (if the answer to the mother of questions, "Does Steem count as commercial use of content?" is yes)