Jaguar Force Innovates: Author Compensation Agreements and the Decentralization of Support for Antiabuse Initiatives

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This is a story about justice being served, a story about the serendipitous ways in which compromise can come about, a story about a happy ending of mutual understanding and respect.

It begins with the case covered in one of our previous posts in which @always1success was posting photographs that his clients sent him from different countries of the world. One of these clients apparently ended up sending him photographs taken by Anastasia Vasilchuk instead of his own photographs and the user ended up posting them believing the author was the client who sent them to him, believing he had the permission by the author when in reality the author was Anastasia, who had not consented or was aware of this. In other words, the user ended up monetizing content by anastasia without her authorization and without crediting her.

Opportunity Knocks

After our report on the case was posted @always1success contacted us and explained the circumstances that had led to this unfortunate inadvertence, he also expressed his willingness to help fight abuse and to compensate Anastasia.

It was an unusual proposition, we usually get very few proposals from users willing to help fight abuse, but coming from a user who we had reported for abuse, it was unheard of, we were in disbelief.

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Turning Stones To Bread

We had already onboarded @anastasiavasilc to Steem thanks to the help of @whatsup who made an account for her, so we thought: Why not have the user compensate Anastasia in the form of a delegation to her steem account?

That way she would have enough SP to have a somewhat significant vote right from the start and also enough RC to post and comment at her own discretion. In turn we would then ask Anastasia to join the @SteemFlagRewards @FlagTrail to help fight abuse, since it was the SFR team who initially spotted the irregularity in the first place, which lead to the JF investigation.

The Art of The Deal

We went ahead and negotiated a 1500SP delegation for 6 months plus a full vote to any post Anastasia makes in that same period, agreeing to take the user off our blacklist provided that he didn't engage in any more abuse of any type in the future. The agreement was sealed and the delegation made.

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We then informed Anastasia about the deal we had cut for her and about how to update her account data as well as how to begin posting when she was ready, additionally we asked her if she would like to join the @FlagTrail so that any VP she didn't use would be put to use to fight abuse:

She accepted and told us that at the moment she didnt want to start posting yet, but that she wanted her photographs removed from the user's posts. As you can see in the post, the photographs were removed. She also asked us that we make sure that none of the other photographs in her VK or Instagram profile were also used inadvertently by the user, we communicated this to the user and he reviewed said profiles making sure none of her other photographs were posted in his profile.

Mission Impossible Accomplished

The impossible had been achieved, we had gone from detecting abuse, to contacting the real author, to onboarding her, then to having the author compensated in the form of a substantial delegation, then to onboarding her to the FragTrail so that any VP the author didn't use was put to use fighting abuse, while also making rewards for those flags.

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"...the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic--shimmying up the pole and out of the smokehole, a shaman's maneuver carried out at an "impossible angle" to the universe."

The Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey

Decentralization of Support for Antiabuse Initiatives

This event suggested to us a new way to gain support for antiabuse initiatives, so far most initiatives gain most of their flagging capabilities from large delegations coming from few stakeholders, which represent single points of failure.

The new way the case above suggests is a novel one in that support would be gained from various newly onboarded stakeholders who have acquired stake after being compensated by the users infringing their rights.

The Jaguar Team is exploring ways in which this novel approach can be deployed in a systematic manner, in the next post we will present a protocol and conceptual framework to achieve that objective. Until then.

This is Jaguar Force,
Reporting directly from the Jungle.
Onwards!