RE: Why I removed all my posts!
My view for what it is worth, is you're curating photographs and people are upvoting based on your taste and judgment.
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).