Should NSFW Content Require Verification (For Copyright)? Plagiarism & Reposts In New/Created. Part 1 of 2.
I spend time in the trenches of /created (aka "New") every day. Attempting to provide encouragement for the occasional real minnow in a sea of plagiarism, memes and reposts is a thankless and soul-sucking task. However, after watching the feed for a few months, you start to get an idea of the kind of content that shows up there.
Spoiler alert: a ton of it is NSFW reposts, both professional looking (porn) and stuff that appears ripped from random women's Instagrams (not for profit stuff, I hear it's called "amateur", ahem)
Further spoiler alert: 99.9% of it appears to be reposted without rights (abuse / theft / plagiarism), and the other .1% is @steemed-open and @sean-king (ie. legit.)
In general, the 99.9% of this content that is obviously stolen for blatant cash-grab reasons reflects very poorly on Steemit as a whole. Much like BookingTeam ensures that the "Trending" page looks like circle-jerk spam-marketing every day by reposting and upvoting their own cut-and-pasted articles from last week(unchanged), these sheisters make "New" look like the "dox a camgirl" section of 4chan. ([I hope] I just made that up.)
Now, for reasons that may have to do with my extremely aggressive stance against human trafficking, the plagiarism and reposts of NSFW content annoy me more than any of the other garbage in created. It's got all the "copyright violation" of more run-of-the-mill plagiarism, but it's also directly profiting off of the use of a body that is, in all likelihood, not consenting to its use.
At this point, I should probably state categorically I'm not a prude and don't have any fundamental objections to NSFW content, the human body or human sexuality. If women (or brave men anxious for failure) want to attempt to monetize their bodies on the internet, or even give them away free, that is their prerogative.
Having said that, I think this is only going to become a bigger problem. There are a lot of ill-gotten gains to be had this way, and it's already clogging up /created rather thoroughly. If this keeps up, only the hot section and the manual search will be usable!
In part 2 I hope to propose a feasible, decentralized way to handle this problem that seems to have proven effective in other communities. Stay tuned.
Sources: Imgflip, Sargon of Akkad via YT, @sean-king, @steemed-open, please check out these user's blogs.
Copyright: The Office
Wow. I watched that video, and now I'm sick to my stomach.
I thought about putting up a stronger warning about it, but I feel like the more of us that go through that, the less these foul beasts will be able to get away with such things.
My apologies for the unpleasantness.
You're right, it's a necessary revelation that more people need to force themselves to be made aware of. People continuing to say "no, no... I can't watch that"are only making rooting out and prosecuting these monsters more impossible.
Indeed. In fact, Sargon makes that very point in the video rather well. I think it's his main thesis: Those who deny the possibility of such terrible things are inadvertently providing cover to those who perpetrate them.
Yeah it's all basically stolen material when it comes to nsfw. I hope there will be a solution to do something against it because I want steemit to be clean !
I also really don't like the idea of stolen images being burned into a permanent block-chain. I'll touch on that more in part 2 though.
Thanks for your regular commenting. I see you all over Steemit!
Haha I try my best to engage with my favorite users all the time !
Looking forward to your proposal on this. I think most people don't really care about the #nsfw content. I don't know if it's ok to impose a different set of rules for nsfw content though.
I think it should be treated the same as plagiarism in other tags/topics. Call @cheetah, @steemcleaners and start flagging. I saw @dan flagging a nsfw post a few weeks ago.
I like the idea of treating it differently because the results are different.
Plagiarism doesn't reflect poorly on the person who has been plagiarized. However, stealing this type of content from places like Reddit prevents the user with the rights from being able to ever remove it (as if that was completely possible on the internet)...which can end up hurting them later. There's still a lot of judgment and job restrictions that can come into play for those who have this kind of content shared.
Unlike articles, not all NSFW images are shared with even the consent of the creator/right's holder.
This would also nip revenge-type sharing of private images which is starting to be criminalized in some jurisdictions (which is, IMO, a totally different pandora's box).
Here's an interesting read I've stumbled upon recently: The European Court of Justice ruled three years ago that anything published openly on the web may be freely reused by anyone in any way on their own website.
People should think twice and understand that they are responsible for everything that they release out there on the internet.
When there's no consent when NSFW images are first published then that's a different thing all together.
That is a very interesting ruling. I would have expected the opposite from the ECJ, to be honest.
Does the ECJ care whether there were legally published or not? The way that reads from your snippet, the answer would be no...
Edit: Just read the article, that's some BS, wow. Pretty regressive IMO.
I couldn't bring myself to hit play.
I think I've seen similar if not the same in other posts.
You're a stronger person than me for even venturing in there.
FYI, It's Sargon's video on the reality of human trafficking rings. Best viewed when you are in the mood for some righteous anger.
I saw that video Sargon made and that art presented in the video. Absolutely disgusting.
Note: I have untagged this post as NSFW, since I do not want it to be auto-filtered under most Steemian's default settings.