RE: Does Steemit count as commercial usage of content?
The fact is you are earning something and may it be fiat or cryptocurrency there was an exchange that happened.
Even if the image is the not the focused and was used to highlight or even just break the text by putting it in a post that garnered crypto or money it was used for commercial gain.
To say that copyright laws are dead and a thing of the past is just plain stupid. So is anyone free to get any image of you and use it to and make money off it. Same way with your stories, what if someone compiled all your fiction and sold it off?
Just because it is in the internet does not mean that it is up for grabs.
I made a post about this a week ago and shows how strong I feel against it.
Imitation maybe the best form of flattery but Plagiarism is not
Here is another article about it
Let's talk about: Copyright
It is hard to find images especially if we want something very specific but it is only that way that we continually help improve the system
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 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.
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