Possible lawsuit threatened against Steemit
I often check out what is going on with Steem and Steemit on twitter and I happen to come across this tweet and its follow up tweet yesterday. I am sure you can look it up on twitter to find out more information as far as who it is from etc.
"Dear @steemit,
More than a month has elapsed since I sent the first of several DMCA notices regarding 30-ish of my copyrighted images being monetized on your site. You have not responded to any. I will escalate to lawyers this week if you continue to duck resolution."
"Update: @steemit replied saying my notices did not meet their terms of service.
Which are irrelevant, since I have no service agreement with them."
This brings up some points that I think will eventually go through the court rooms a few times. I have no idea if this particular person will escalate it to an actual lawsuit but I know in the future someone eventually will.
It is going to be very interesting when those do start to occur because of the nature of the blockchain and who/what the courts will rule as responsible. I hope Steemit inc has a plan in place already and strong lawyers because this type of thing is coming. Once big companies like Disney/whoever start to get involved in due time this will be taken to a new level. Many of these blockchain uses are somewhat new but the problems they bring up are very old.
I for one don't have full faith that legal systems will work out what is best in these scenarios so I think it will be an interesting thing to watch. Hopefully its not too detrimental to projects but I could see some things getting ugly.
I don't know of any cases in courts now with such a thing but I would be curious if you do and to hear your thoughts on the issue.
I actually mentioned potential copyright lawsuits in a comment to a friend a week ago. Its a very serious and real issue which it seems from your post is about to come to a head. I personally think the costs themselves would be enough to put Steemit out of business, the lawyers would be putting in overtime to sort out the legal intricacies for years as it would to the best of my knowledge be test case without precedent, and how do you delete the undeletable ?
More than ever, there needs to be guardians and an auto system for running all material posted here through a tineye type of check for pics and one of the many anti-plagiarism scanners for text or it could simply be the end.
I see the scammers getting clever now by putting their names on pics and removing all meta data off pics which are obviously ripped off to try and fool the checks.
Simply a case of needing more personal and all the tech available to sort this now.
Yeah... I've noticed that too... it's super devious.
Yea I agree. I have not see any court cases in this realm yet but I am sure there will be many coming up. I do hope there is some sort of plan or at least the concept of what legal precedent they would try to be covered under.
But I mean of course it's coming, have you seen how many YouTube authors get robbed of their IP by steemit scammers? Because I've seen that, there were 5 or 6 shameful uploaders I found just within one hour of searching once, each having about 4-5 stolen audios uploaded to dsound during one week.
I checked the tweet and he sez that the images will be coming down. Not sure if there's some way for devs to delete images off a server? But the same guy sez there are more stolen images that have already been posted...
...and also opines, "Color me surprised that a crytocurrency-based site attracts users who have trouble with ethics and laws and the like."
if he can't spell "cryptocurrency", how can he claim to understand it?"
Give me the tweet, I'll answer him
I think he is confusing "decentralized" with crypto, and crypto with criminal.
Fractional reserve banking is the real crime :)
"color me surprised"
The copyright laws are pretty straight forward, and have been well tested by the court system in the US. In the simplest terms the content creator is required to insure that the content either belongs to the creator or is properly licensed. End of story.
Now comes the question. Who is responsible? The creator, certainly. Is Steemit? To what extent? Is FB responsible for all the images and text on it. So far, no. They do have checks in place and complaints like the one above are taken down. I think Steemit would be best served if they would respond, ask to see the proof and vaporize the accounts found to be in violation. At the very least.
Hiding from this issue does nothing good. It IS an issue on Steemit, and needs to be addressed yesterday.
Thanks for your excellent post that brings this issue to our attention once again.
The blockchain will live on whether or not Steemit dot com itself is taken down. There is already other third party websites that use the blockchain, right? Busy.org, Utopian, eSteem, I honestly don't know the full list but I just see an attempt to do anything to Steemit.com without knowing how this tech works will bring about a hydra head situation of other sites popping up.
On the other hand, Steemit.com themselves can just be that happy front end that has censorship and what not, and a lot of users will just jump ship to more uncensored sites, right?
I am spitting these thoughts out knowing I must be missing some information on how the tech itself works that I'm sure plays a part.
I am spitting with you :) but I have similar thoughts. The thing is I think it would slow innovation etc and could actually hurt the development of things like SMTs if Steemit inc took a hit from something like this.
If some judge rules the "company" can be held liable then all those others like busy etc could be held accountable as well. That may make other places way less likely to develop those front ends.
Could innovation get any slower? =P
This whole thing comes across like typical peer-to-peer legal battles, as in, a constant uphill struggle for the courts and lawmakers. All it takes is for one person to throw a little front end anonymously onto the blockchain and everything becomes available again. It's like when Isohunt, the torrent site got taken down after years of investigation and millions of dollars and work hours by the FBI. The victory was celebrated across the US political system... for about 24 hours until somebody anonymous who happened to back all the data up simply re-released the website intact.
Isohunt continues to exist today
Yea that's hitting the nail on the head. Thing is it hasent even really started to work its way through legal system. I foresee many crappy laws being established over not understanding the tech and just slowing down the whole space.
Surely this has come up before with other social media platforms... how has Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc all dealt with it's users posting content that they do not have the copyright to. I'm sure there's a User Service Agreement somewhere that says that anything you post is your responsibility and not the responsibility of the platform...
The difference is, you can't delete anything from the blockchain. Facebook servers you can hit delete
I thought I read somewhere when ned was talking about some sort of legal concept it is covered under but I cant find it at this point. I cant think of what it is akin too either but if I find it I will post it to you.
I know people have gotten things pulled of say youtube for example but as far as I understand I don't think there is a real way to take things off the blockchain. They may be able to block things in a way from the steemit front end but I have no idea how courts would see this.
From Steem ToS:
It's interesting what you said earlier, that the plantiff has no agreement with Steemit, but it sounds like Steemit would just direct the plantiff to the user who was profiting off their work.
Thanks for that!
Yea that comment about him having "no agreement" was in another of his tweets. Interesting where he goes from here.
I don't understand much about blockchain but I have learnt that images can cause this site pain. Is it something from pixabay or? I am asking because I use pixabay at times and I have been reading it can be a problem.
I need to start sketching my images or taking them I guess. Thanks for sharing :)
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any art hosting company deals with this sort of thing pretty much non-stop. i don't think it'll really impact steemit as a platform. They might have to do something to hide the data in a search result or something (in essence, deleting it from public view)
Most decentralized platforms face such copyright issues as of now.
This is happening due to no regulatory system over Blockchain.
But I like your notification to Steem management, I am keen to know what actions they take.
Your post had been curated by the @buildawhale & @upmyvote team and mentioned here:
https://steemit.com/curation/@buildawhale/buildawhale-curation-digest-03-19-18
We really liked what you did in this article. Thanks for using our services. We hope you continue to produce good content and use our services again to promote it.
Thanks for keeping everyone aware of the possible consequences of using stolen work.