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RE: Welcome To The Steemit That Vote Buying Hath Wrought
I've reported it a few times in the past, and he was banned from @buildawhale. A few witnesses started to flagged him as well.
It has gone on for a long time, and don't understand why it has been ignored.
It's one of @contentjunkie's bots.
While I wouldn't call it "plagiarism" and it is something I was told isn't something that can be "dealt".
I am not going to allow it to be rewarded with @buildawhale services as it offers nothing of value and nothing unique and is just cashing in on someone else's work.
Not to make it more frustrating but to date, it has earned $6,686 in post rewards.
Pending Payouts
Isn't taking someone's unedited work, using it for a profit illegally (according to home jurisdiction copyright), and keeping the proceeds very dang close to the literal dictionary definition of plagiarism?
Thanks for the rewards update. Disappointing, but I assume much was bought so the real haul is lower.
No. Embedding a YouTube video is not copyright infringement (Google it) and plagiarism is not really the grievance this would fall under. It's YouTube's decision to allow broadcast of their protected material (which in turn protects the original copyright holder) on other websites.
Think of the website that embeds a video and makes money off other, unrelated ads on that website. Similar situation on Steemit.
Perhaps an argument could be made in the case where someone says, "Hey look at this multimillion dollar Hollywood film I made, I own the rights to it and this promo video" but it isn't being claimed.
This just shows how Steemit is a paradigm changing platform. Many are incensed by accounts like this (I don't personally like them myself) but the relationship between embedding copyright and Steem rewards does not exist, at least not legally.
I want to reiterate, @movietrailers is not doing anything illegal in this instance, as you claim.
You think this guy had Marvel's (Disney's) Permission?
I doubt it.
Further reading:
"Embedded YouTube Videos
The issue of copyright infringement becomes murkier when I include an embedded youTube video link, for example in a HubPages video capsule. Now, the youTube video appears on my online article, blog, or website, in contrast to the previous case, where it only appears as a link.
Am I infringing copyright laws now?
Some people argue that it is not infringing upon any copyright laws because you are only including a link - an embedded link - but still just a link. If anybody is libel, they reason, it should be youTube who is hosting the content, or the person who uploaded the content onto youTube. Since you did not do either of those things, you clearly are not doing anything wrong.
This reasoning, however, is problematic. It is problematic because now the embedded video is appearing right on your online article or website. This is similar to embedding a picture or image that belongs to someone else.
In the case of a picture or image, you must first get permission from the owner of the image, unless the image is public domain. You should also attribute all images back to their original site (i.e. site you got the image from) and content creator/owner.
Having an embedded youTube video on your online article or website is exactly like having an embedded image - thus permission must also be given from the owner of the youTube video."
https://turbofuture.com/internet/Embed-YouTube-Videos---Copyright-Infringement
Why aren't you reading the YouTube terms and conditions? That is the governing document. It is what the rights holder has agreed to as well as the end user. You are scrambling all over trying to play armchair lawyer but aren't bothering to read the most important document.
Or don't bother because if you look at what is actually published to the blockchain you'll see it's just a bare URL. I'm not even posting embed code that is done by Steemit Inc. They turn YouTube URLs into YouTube embeds on the presentation layer. It's fully in accordance with YouTube's terms.
You can feel free to call them shitposts that's your opinion. I would vehemently disagree with your opinion. To call them plagiarism is just factually wrong.
"Hai Guys, does the Remington Firearms Terms and Conditions say who I can legally shoot with my new gun?"
LOL, you are revealing yourself to be the armchair lawyer.
T&C have no force of law. To even reference them demonstrates you are clueless on US copyright law.
"You can feel free to call them shitposts that's your opinion. I would vehemently disagree with your opinion."
They are the definition of shit posts and you fucking know it, you disingenuous hack. That's an objective fact, not an opinion.
They are literally 0 effort. Dictionary definition of a shitpost.
Myself and others have already pointed out your erroneous application of the law. Your snide rejection of the facts won't change them any.
You have also failed to understand what was actually published and what is being facilitated by Steemit Inc and YouTube.
It's obvious you are out of your depth on any sort of legal or technical argument it's probably best for you to just stick to your subjective opinion of it being a shitpost and the amount of effort involved.
So how much effort exactly should one put in to receive how much back? Is it hourly? Can some people put in more effort in less time? Do you think Steem should only reward users who spend hours on long form content?
"So how much effort exactly should one put in to receive how much back? Is it hourly? Can some people put in more effort in less time? Do you think Steem should only reward users who spend hours on long form content?"
Reductio ad absurdum.
You know what you are doing, but the fact that you can defend it tells me all I need to know about the cynical abuser you are.
So your legal argument fell and now you can't even defend your effort argument. You really are quite pathetic.
It's kind of a grey area, part of plagiarism is taking credit for not only just use. It also falls into another grey area of "sharing" in terms of legality.
That being said, I do not approve of this type of no-effort, automated, and repurposing other people's work for profit and is why he is blacklisted from using @buildawhale promotional services. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other bots that will be happy to promote it.
"Unfortunately, there are a lot of other bots that will be happy to promote it."
The 65 rep would appear to be proof positive of that.
This is actually worse than just posting empty posts and botting them up, because it's theft of content too.
Given the amount of organic votes most post get (next to none), I have to wonder why anyone would bother to even post anything but placeholder content at all, presuming they of course want the rewards.
"it's theft of content too."
False, permission has been fully granted by the creators. Those are Youtube embeds that the creators have full control over. If you look at what is actually being posted to the blockchain you'll see that they are literally just URLs.
Let us see your written permission for use of copyright.
"This reasoning, however, is problematic. It is problematic because now the embedded video is appearing right on your online article or website. This is similar to embedding a picture or image that belongs to someone else."
"In the case of a picture or image, you must first get permission from the owner of the image, unless the image is public domain. You should also attribute all images back to their original site (i.e. site you got the image from) and content creator/owner."
LOL there is a 'Share' button below the video providing me a link to use. It's encouraged.
Yea this is it, my view too.
The way to deal with this, in my opinion, is to make it not profitable to do. Most bid-bot rounds are now returning a negative ROI, which means to earn that $6,686 in post rewards he would have had to spend more than that buying those votes.
If that's not the case and he is making money off of the purchased votes, then we need to see how we can prevent that. In my opinion vote buying isn't the problem as much as profitable vote buying.
By the way, isn't the easiest way to make this unprofitable simply blacklisting these users and unvoting all their posts with no refund?
There's literally no downside to this (save time to implement), and upside for all legitimate parties?
I guess the bots would lose a tiny sliver of curation on abuse posts, too...
Blacklisting these users is fine, but that doesn't solve anything since there will always be someone else willing to sell their vote and the spammers can easily make new accounts faster than we can catch and blacklist all of them.
So manual blacklisting is a band-aid solution to the problem. If, on the other hand, costs of vote buying go up overall (meaning it returns a negative direct ROI), then the spamming will stop naturally since it will lose money for them as they don't gain anything from the increased visibility of their posts like "good" content does.
That has been one of my goals ever since starting the bot tracker site - to bring efficiency and transparency to the vote buying market - which prevents people from profiting off of the inefficiency. It's certainly not perfect yet, but it's come a very long way from where it was 6 months ago.
Also, I personally feel that refunds should be given for users who are blacklisted. Taking their money without providing the service they are paying for is stealing plain and simple and that is not something that I do. Even if they have stolen content or done any number of other bad things, I still don't feel that gives me the right to stoop to their level and steal from them. Obviously each bot owner can make his or her own decision about how to handle that situation.
This is why I said manually blacklist and DO NOT REFUND. Not just manually black list.
"I still don't feel that gives me the right to stoop to their level and steal from them."
Equivocation. You would not be stealing. It would be in your T&C.
You'll never stop this without refusing refunds.
Then again, that would cut into profits, wouldn't it?
Call it what you will but i will not take people's money when I knowingly will not provide them a service.
Actually quite the opposite - instead of keeping their money I'm giving it back to them.
"Actually quite the opposite - instead of keeping their money I'm giving it back to them."
Deliberate misinterpretation of my argument?
Yes, and we both know that you think if you stopped refunding abusers, you would scare off money from the likes of these movie trailer posts and your bot would be less profitable per SP.
Just like the few (2?) that actually use a blacklist - SS and BAW - which make less than the rest.
You are uniquely positioned to already know the previous fact.
Let me set something straight here. There are quite a few more bots than the two you have listed that use a blacklist, some of them are quite extensive. These bots have a myriad of different tools and options at their disposal to combat spam on the platform - for example:
Where do you think all of those tools and options came from? I have spent many, many hours of my scarce available time building all of these things and many more and they are all open source and freely available for anyone to use.
On top of that I have built many other features which reduce the profitability of the bots in return for a better user experience, all of which I implement first and foremost on my own bot.
I have blacklisted @movietrailers and will continue to blacklist any accounts that are obviously engaging in plagiarism. I happen to disagree with you and some other bot owners on this one point about whether or not to refund bids from blacklisted users. I disagree with it on principle, not because i feel it will reduce the earnings to my bot (which I honestly don't think it will really have much of an effect on anyway).
We are both going after the same goals here. I literally have a significant portion of my family's savings invested in Steem and very much would like for the platform to succeed and grow. We may disagree on how best to accomplish that, but that's ok - that's life.
I think you are a great writer and I enjoy the content you post, but I expected you to be more open minded to the fact that other people can have different opinions than you on some of these topics. I take offense to the fact that you are accusing me of promoting spam and plagiarism on the platform because I am only after profits when there is significant evidence to the contrary.
If you're interested in having a constructive and respectful conversation about the topics at hand I am always open to that, otherwise the conversation ends here.
@yabapmatt always remember there is responsibility that service providers must consider...Its a self-fulfilling prophecy to expect participants to act in the best interest of the platform, taking that into account, don't expect the movie trailers to stop and your business to flourish at the expense of public eyes who would as @lexiconical alluded to would say "this is nonsense", why make the effort when I can find a random trailer, post it and make use of your service...two or three times, I let pass by but four and five it becomes a norm until it becomes a circus show...My hope is that you won't be the cheerleader of the circus show but you would take the necessary steps to address the situation
Please read my above comment and in the future I would suggest you not jump in to these conversations unless you really know what you're talking about.
What the fuck is happening in this comment?
He needs your permission to have an opinion about the abuse your services facilitate, in spite of easy solutions to stopping this abuse already implemented by @themarkymark and @therealwolf?
Shit, I better look at my witness votes.
I agree, and wondered myself if this account was negative ROI.
The unfortunate fact is all other customers are caught in the middle.
PS - The title implied more blame on voting bots than I intended, but it sounded catchy. I wanted to argue that before all stake was sold, people would flag but no, the same economic incentive would have just been there to self-vote.
This is slightly different from what would have happened without voting bots, but probably not materially.
Most windows for a long time have been positive ROI (in many windows as much as 100% ROI), it's only recent weeks negative ROI is becoming common.
Just a friendly question... I may be naive for asking this, but its OK.. I would still like to hear your opinion on the subject.
Since the app you developed (steembottracker) is pretty much the standard today. How feasible would it be for it to have a shared blacklist? I'm no dev, which is why I ask... Maybe if the website itself would not allow bids to be "from" and "towards" certain blacklisted users.
Granted this won't fix all the problems, you've made some excellent points here outside of blacklist implementations and we also know there is always a bad actor who will find the new loophole to exploit. But maybe, just maybe it will help enough.
I'm also considering doing some public shaming myself, meaning that if a bot is preferred by scammers and spammers because the operator simply does not care, then everyone should know this and make up their mind. Maybe that would not work either and I'm showing more naivety. But hey... one can brainstorm publicly I guess.
Why am I not surprised.... Isn't this some sort of universal law by now? @contentjunkie is the same guy calling out @grumpycat for what he believed was "abuse".
I don't know if you remember this hard hitting self rightgeous rant of journalism.
I guess from now on, every time I see someone get all self righteous I'm going to assume automatically their are abusing the system themselves.
Here what's probably going to happen:
Long story short, it's OK to be an unethical human being because I have enough money to be one. I get the message perfectly clear, just don't expect me to feel an ounce of respect for you.
I keep that image, ironically created by CJ, close at hand: