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RE: Does Steemit count as commercial usage of content?
The fact that if Steemit counts or not as commercial use is somewhat controversial, because here you are not making money, but cryptos. However, the copyright always applies, whether or not generating money with it content, unless the image you are using is explicitly marked as "for noncommercial use".
What I personally do most of the time, is just go to Google Images, press "tools", then "usage rights", and finally in "labeled for reuse". In this way, the images of pages like Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons or Pxhere will also appear.
Well, cryptocurrencies are money in a sense.
Copyright laws, I think that they are outdated, as the top comment on this post explains. Lately, I've been seeing all sorts of arguments for this idea on the platform. But regardless of whether they're outdated or not, copyright laws are usually enforced on commercial use and not personal usage. You can make your own posters and calendars with them, put them on your fridge, call your friends to see something, and as long as you're not using the texts or pictures for commercial usage (selling, re-selling, modifying and then selling, etc.), then you're alright by all laws and moral views I know.
That's why I think that the focus should be on whether Steem counts as commercial use or not. If it does, then there's a lot of strictly and technically illegal stuff on the platform and we should enforce the national laws of... some place... probably the US or our own national countries, on the platform. However, I'm not sure whether this would count as commercial usage, since I'm not selling the content, and as far as I'm concerned, the moneymaking is very much something else other than commercial use of the content.
So, in my own personal view, the Steem blockchain should not be regulated per se by the laws applying to commercial use of content. Instead, it should be regulated by an ethical system like:
I'd agree with this for commercial use, and for the times when you're actively searching for an illustration for your blog posts. I would not be strictly for it since there are probably pictures more competent at illustrating your post that are just not within what commercial-use copyright allows you.
However, many times, like with memes or Facebook posts or such, when you post on the Steem blockchain, you just want to share something or talk about something. It could be, for example, sharing a beautiful picture you saw the other day, taken by a professional photographer, or a poem, or whatever kind of content that you would actually not be allowed to embed if you were not the owner, but only in the sense of commercial use.
If we're to consider that this is just your blog, your personal journal, a tiny board where you paste stuff for your friends to come by on their weekends to check out what you've written or found interesting during the week, then I don't think that we should be limiting ourselves to "only free use images" and the usual plagiarism regulations.
When you're making a homework for a teacher, for example, it's a different kind of thing. You're implicitly claiming that what you're delivering is yours, and it's usually regulated by academic guidelines such as APA's (and other methodologies with quoting regulations that tell you how much of the work can be yours, how to cite authors, etc.). And I've seen authors on Steemit using APA's guidelines to cite works. They apparently, and I don't criticise them for it, think or consider Steemit to be a formal platform and not a mere social network.
Yes, but I don't think that any government will accept Steem to pay taxes, so I don't think they will consider it as money.
I personally am not very in favor of the laws of copyright, because they contradict the free market and the free propagation of ideas, creating barriers to progress, but as far as I know, and I'm not a legal expert, it's that even lending a book, music CD or movie is illegal under copyright, if you print a calendar with someone else's content and put it in your refrigerator, it is also.
What happens is that they are laws of such absurd fulfillment, that nobody will take you to court for doing so. Imagine bringing to trial all people who lend a book, or who use an image of another person on the Internet, or put in a video 30 seconds of a popular song. It would be costly and endless judgments that would not lead anywhere, so usually they don't, although technically, technically, they could do it.
We should also see the jurisprudence of cases, in which many people have infringed copyright, but has been protected by other laws such as property, and have gone unpunished.
Although it is not necessary to complicate so much, the only person that can sue you for copyright is the one that owns it, otherwise, there is not much legal problem with that. I use the images tagged as noncommercial usually, but it is more for myself than for the law, because nobody is going to point fingers at me for that, there are millions, tens of millions of people, who do the same on the Internet every day, so you don't have to worry about that.
You can put the source of the image as a courtesy, if you wish, and to avoid disputes with SJWhales, but it really is not much of a problem.
After all, you are free to choose.
Makes sense. There's still a lot we can do to help and promote artists' works, but I don't think we should limit ourselves if it's impossible (as long as we aren't dishelping or harming them with our actions).
Also, very nice tip, that one about using Google's free use tool. I didn't have any idea that it existed. I'll try it out for my next post. :)
@mdbrantingham Check out the first paragraph of @vieira's comment. That's one of the aspects of outdated copyright laws, in my opinion.
You are harming artists when you deprive them of their rightful royalties on the use of their works - for whatever reason! You must pay a license fee on stock images even FOR PERSONAL USE! That's because I DON'T WORK FOR FREE!