Is It OK To Make Money On Content That Isnt Original? - I Believe So
I came across this amazing obscure article on one of my Facebook friends feeds. It was perfect, and something that I felt in my heart that everyone who participates in digital media needs to read and understand. I made the decision to get it circulating WITHIN Steemit.
Here it is
Did you notice the flag?
This person left a lengthy reply as well, stating how it isnt right that I am getting money for someone elses article. Im just going to call it as I see it. I know what this person has been sipping on.
Here is why it is perfectly fine making a little change with content that isnt original
You discovered it
And you brought it to a platform where it ddnt exist. In the case of Steemit, it is a very small platform that is still growing. Not everyone is creative, and so we shouldnt have a problem with people sharing their jewels with the community. People are doing it all the time with news articles, youtube videos, movie trailers and even porn. I merely decided to publish it within the platform rather than just link it, so it circulates better within Steemit.
"But you are getting paid for someone elses work"
In this case, I have not only discovered something, but I decided to share it with people. That has got to be worth something. This article took me almost an hour to put together because I am new to Steemit formatting. I had such respect for the article as a piece of work that I wanted to share it exactly as it was on the other social medium. That has got to be worth something.
This article AND ITS WELL ARTICULATED VALUABLE KNOWLEDGE is now part of Steemit internally and circulates among our community easily because of my discovery and the work I did. Is that not worth something?
And lets not forget that even within Steemit, we can get paid for curating. And depending on when we upvote, we get to make more money, essentially taking from the original authors money, for merely upvoting, and not doing the work of bringing something new ourselves to the platform.
"You are taking and giving nothing to the original author"
I took nothing from the author, and in fact, I made sure to link to the author in the beginning and at the end of the article. Because of my work here, more people are discovering him. He actually gets something more than if I never shared him here in the first place.
But we know what this is really about, right?
You dont expect me to contact the author, and share some Bitcoin with him. You just saw the dollar amount on the post, along with the fact that it wasnt my original article and felt that acidic Haterade start coming back up your esophagus.
Spend your flags more wisely.
The fact is...
That discovering brilliant one of a kind content from outside of Steemit and making the decision to do the work of presenting it within Steemit, so it may become part of our internal buzz and KNOWLEDGE, makes our community better.
Lets not turn green when we see others making green. Lets ask ourselves first before raising that flag;
Did this person go out of their way to bring value to others? Did they give credit where it was due?
If the answer is yes, then dont concern yourself with the little bit of change they made. They didnt take from anyone, and every penny they got was in appreciation of what they did.
Do you really want to be the one hater in the midst of all of that appreciation of obviously valued entertainment or knowledge, that wouldnt have been there otherwise?
With love,
Doc
Actually, you do take from authors. You regularly post the art of contemporary artists and don't even bother to inform your audience of the names of the artists let alone link to their sites to bring about awareness. You make money off the works of others. it's that simple.
I haven't seen this image in a while, seems appropriate
if you Follow & Upvote me, i will Follow & Upvote you...!
With all due respect, you gotta do better than that buddy. Meaningless upvotes dont mean shit here.
Agree @docdelux, sometimes you find that nugget that you just can't boil down to do it justice. I was in the process of writting a solid - "hell ya!" - but after reading more of the comments I'm finding that I'm somewhat torn on this topic. I would not call this plagiarism as you clearly identify that it is not yours and it is righteously good content. I think it does fall into the grey area. I think flagging is not the way to go either... Sorry man, I'm trying to support you at the same time say i think you might be walking a thin line. Not sure if I'm doing well on either. Keep up the posting and sourcing great stuff... I'm sure you'll find the right balance.
Sharing is caring and now profitable. It's not a bad idea. Information will only spread faster. Who knows, maybe this could possibly help reverse the dumbing down of America.
I wish we had some way to organize different types of posts, filters besides tags and this hot trending and new. I think at this point it'd be kind of sad to see links saturating our pages and eating a lot of the reward pool because that makes it harder for content creators BUT I do agree with your overall point, I don't have a problem with someone getting a few cents for showing me a good article. It just needs to be seperated from original content, maybe a separate section for it. Same with resteems actually.
@docdelux, I really enjoyed the article and upvoted it, but i will say that i paused before doing so.
If you don't source or credit the material that you post on here...that's plagiarism and is generally frowned upon. However, you DID credit the original author and you thought it was something that others should read.
I agree that this article was excellent, and one of the reasons i voted for it is because some authors are completely OK having their work redistributed across platforms.
A good example would be James Corbett as I follow his work very closely and he has stated on more than one occasion that he has not problem with sharing his material. Generally speaking, having people share your work on other platforms is a way of reaching a larger audience.
Conversely, there are people here on steemit that constantly repost content from the same source, using the news outlets name and are making a lot of money doing so. I'm not gonna name names here, but i stopped voting for this account once i realized they were not affiliated with the actually outlet.
Two things that Steemit users can do to avoid this kind of confusion is to begin the post with:
Finally, thanks for linking the article as i probably wouldn't have come across it myself, cheers.
I read this intending to disagree with you but I think you have a valid point. Also, I see tonnes of recycled news articles being posted on here that never really get flagged, and it seems to be much more widely known info. So,why not? Especially if it's something you can bring to a larger audience.