My view for what it is worth, is you're curating photographs and people are upvoting based on your taste and judgment.
The only people that have grounds for grievance are the copyright owners of the photographs.
There may come a time when many of us will be required to seek clearance for the use of photos. We may be pursued aggressively, maybe not. I'd advise everyone that lifts (non-public domain) photographs from the internet to set aside a pot of money to deal with these matters.
Some claims will be dealt with as fair dealing. Some claims will require authors to cough up cash. Other claims will require authors to take down material and damages may be sought. These are the realities of copyright clearances.
Outside of the copyright owners no-one else really has grounds for grievance. Unless they feel you were misrepresenting photos as your own. From what I can tell you have always attributed the photos appropriately, so there should be no issue on that score.
Just my two cents worth.
Hosting plateforms are legally liable for the content they host. Steem is the hosting plateform and we are its stake holders. We are entitled as a community to decide what kind of legal exposure we want to subject ourselves to, and it only makes sense from both an economic, business, legal and ethical perspective that we do not encourage people to seek income from the work of someone else by violating their intellectual property rights. Note also that although Steem is decentralized, Steemit Inc is a US registered company and they are the ones who will be spammed by DMCA take down notices if we allow the IP rights violations to go unchecked.
Steemit should look to how YouTube and other hosting companies deal with copyright infringement. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here I think.
The copyright owner should make a complaint (for all we know @masteryoda may have obtained the requisite clearance) and then the material can be blocked until the matter is resolved (@masteryoda should be given the opportunity to refute breach of copyright claims).
Persistent offenders who receive numerous complaints from copyright owners should be put on a banned list.
Steemit Inc. has clearly attempted to provide for this in the Terms of Service:
I would hope (as a quasi stakeholder myself) that Steemit have sought the best legal advice available. Copyright infringement can become a major headache for a platform like this (I've worked in this field for over a decade). It shouldn't require community policing beyond blatant false attribution.
If we are reliant on the community to police copyright infringement we are pretty much screwed as that approach is not scalable.
How do you remove copyrighted material from a blockchain?
Is that even possible?
You don't. But you can remove it/ stop it from showing on the Steemit site (which is a view of the blockchain data).
You can actually post things like youtube videos and such. They encourage linking and embedding because they still get to run their ads and get ad revenue, and that is passed onto those artists who monetize. That does not apply to static photography though.
Sure, you could do that if you wished. But this is a different kettle of fish. There are people with videos online that would be livid if they found out someone was linking to their video in order to profit from it. When someone copies someone's video on YouTube, the original owner can file a complaint. If someone here embeds a YouTube video it might only result in 20 views, for example, and amount to nothing for the YouTube channel owner, but 20 upvotes from whales here could net that reposter thousands.
Why can't we simply face the fact that we are trying to make money off of others work because we think we can get away with it?
At the very least when embedding a video it would be nice to put a link to the channel, mention the channel's name or something. Very often people won't even do that and end up giving the impression that the video was created by the Steemit.com poster.
This is why we need to have some sort of best practices mentioned for people so that this site will be better than any social media site out there.
If the political will is there we can do both. Be HUGE and make a ton of money and disrupt the heck out of the internet AND do it in an ethical way that will put other troll-riddled sites to shame.
Nah, never mind, I'm too idealistic. Keep stealing others content, who am I kidding?
@doctorstrange - We hit the nesting limit I think. I have added extra info besides just linking the video. I have only shown one video per artist I have shown in most cases, and actually the one I MADE money on was the first one. I actually sent a message via youtube to that author telling him about this site and stating I wouldn't do anymore for awhile as I'd like to see him here doing it himself. Yet that was my single most profitable post and he has a lot of material. I didn't post any of it beyond the initial to mostly raise awareness. I am doing a HIDDEN GEMS music covers and such series (only one post so far) where I'd like to occasionally point out cool videos of musicians that have low viewers. I'm still trying to find a balance which I believe all of us are. I'm pretty familiar with youtube monetization since I have actually gone through the process before.
EDIT: I also stopped posting and worrying about money. If I make money cool. Usually I don't.
We DO know that he didn't get clearances. He already responded that he never contacted any of the original websites, YouTube channels or photographers.
I agree. Which is why we need to establish best practices ASAP as to what is going to be acceptable before everyone feels that "sharing" others content in order to make profit on it is the way things are done here. It's obviously going to be a huge problem going forward if there are a million users "creating" content to profit from by merely copy and pasting it.
Seriously, these sorts of issues need to be hammered out now so that the platform doesn't hit a wall it can't climb.
You can define it as a problem or you can be realistic about it, but not both. There will be a million users (if we're lucky) sharing content, just as there have been on every single social media site in the the history of the Internet. That's what people do. It will need to be addressed by copyright holders making takedown requests when they object (which isn't always), just as it is on every other web property.
Except - too many of Masteryoda post I've seen are someone else's curation.
Going to another person's website and copy and pasting their curation, isn't curating.
For example here's a Masteryoda post and here is the post where he selected 5 photos from someone else's post
The photos posted are amazing - YES. But unless masteryoda runs Avax someone else put in the hard work putting them together and writing up commentary on them.
Curating art IS a valuable skill people SHOULD bring to steemit.
Art Gallery curators do a real job - and there are virtual equivalents to that. Sifting through the mountains of material available on the internet and bringing quality content to the fore, even if it is not your own original content is of great value.
But copying other's curation is no different than copy and pasting a Buzzfeed article in my opinion.
If @masteryoda was transitioning to doing more actual curation with his platform that would be great, in my opinion. But selecting photos from Avax posts alone personally won't get my vote (not that it counts for much).
People are free to upvote, but people are equally free to draw attention to 'copy and pasting' and let people choose to NOT upvote.
Thanks for sharing this, I did not know this to be the case.
Looking at the example,
(from an attribution perspective) @masteryoda did credit Avax, however I think he should make it clearer that the whole post (including the text) was an excerpt of the Avax article. This isn't obvious from reading the post. I wasn't aware of that fact before, so thank you for bringing it up.
(from a copyright infringement perspective) again, it would be for Avax, to lodge a complaint about his use of extracts from their article was a breach of their copyright. As well as possibly the whoever owns the copyright in the photos raising a complaint.
Except for a couple of things. Steemit.com is not the New York Times or YouTube.com. Nobody at Avax is aware of Steemit.com yet. And none are aware that their article is being profited from. Someone here could have contacted Avax and said, "Hey did you know...", but nobody did that. We brought it to the attention of the fellow community member and let them know that what they were doing was not kosher and that they should do their due diligence of contacting the source and getting permission. He elected to hide behind "If they contact me, we will resolve it", of course knowing full well they would not agree to it if they were aware.
I really hope that @masteryoda can know in my heart that I wish no ill will and that even though it must feel like everyone is jumping on him, it's understandable why you felt it was ok to do what you did and nobody is blaming you for it. It's just that now that you know it's not appropriate, to just change your procedure to one that is more time consuming.
If you don't want to do it the right way, we all can understand. After all, if it was as easy to do as what you were doing.... everyone would be doing it.
Agreed. I would say generally there is not a huge issue at the moment from a copyright perspective because attribution is being given (although it is probably a grey area).
He didn't always give attribution, that is more recent. I'm not mad at him for past transgressions, and applaud him for changing to at least giving attribution. Just correcting you on that point so you can more accurately assess the situation.
And again, as far as putting the burden on the original content creator to seek damages when the content user is making a profit without the consent and having made no effort to contact the content creator for their permission is obviously a way to roll the dice in order to make money in the hopes one doesn't get caught. Just because someone isn't aware of a crime doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed.
Some photographs are public domain, some are expressly free to be used, others are expressly determined to be never even photographed (in the case of something at a museum for example) and nearly all other photographs are automatically copyrighted unless expressly determined to be otherwise. You don't even need to put a copyright next to it, but people on the internet. Just.don't.care. Because they want to make money as quickly and easily as possible.
Your standing up for him has earned you 1700, congrats. this further proves my point that as long as you support the whales positions you stand a greater chance to gain a financial reward Which is not to say that I don't think it's perfectly fine to get that much for your comment. You created your comment yourself, it was useful, helpful and worthwhile. Please don't read me wrong on that account.
are you angry or afraid because your content is someone else creation?
he is non of the above. it is just an observation.
Very good points.
Your two cents is worthlre like 5 hundred bucks =P