RE: Does Steemit count as commercial usage of content?
Well, cryptocurrencies are money in a sense.
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 That's one of the aspects of outdated copyright laws, in my opinion.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!