I have decided today to raise the issue of plagiarism, which has been of concern to me for some time now. Especially in the context of SteemIt. Perhaps this text will clarify a few things and, while it is a personal look at the problem, it may make someone aware of the potential threat to the whole platform posed by the monetisation of someone else's content. # Definition Traditionally, we have to start by defining what plagiarism is. Plagiarism is the attribution of ownership or authorship to a work and/or the misrepresentation of the authorship of all or part of a work. Plagiarism is very difficult to define, but we can distinguish two elements: * Personal copyrights - the right to be recognized as the author of a given content, work or other form. * Property rights - the right to compensation for our work in creating a work. In this arrangement, we can speak of plagiarism if: we do not provide the author of the posted content and/or we make money on someone else's content, denying the author economic rights. Especially the latter is very controversial in the context of SteemIt.

Is this already a plagiarism?

Imagine a situation where you put on Steem not your own text, movie, photo, copyrighted (that is everything that is not public domain or under Common Creative (CC0)* licenses). In the academic environment, the rule is that if the number of borrowings reaches or exceeds 40% of the workload, it is a plagiarism. One more criterion is important: plagiarism is conscious action. No plagiarism can be carried out inadvertently.

So if you make a post on SteemIt and the only thing you do is embed a video from another platform, paste an article, upload a photo, then you make a plagiarism. We see ourselves as the authors of the entry (personal rights) and if we do not refuse to reward the entry, we earn money on it (property rights).

How to avoid being accused of plagiarism? In the [assessment] (https://wordcounter.net/blog/2016/04/04/10948_how-many-words-10-minute-speech.html) of the researchers, each minute of a film is on average the equivalent of 150 words. Of course, when we talk about a music clip, we have to take a slightly different number, but for the purposes of this text, let us take that value. This means that if we do not want to violate property and personal rights, we should add 250 words of original content for every minute of the film placed. Photos are a bit more difficult, so don't use photos that are not your own or shared under CC0 and public domain licenses.
And we must make it clear who the author of the content is. Always.

Then we remain within the very strict limits of the academic definition of plagiarism. This is difficult and may seem pointless to some. However, if we assume the role of an artist whose text, film or photo has been used by a foreign person to gain income, we cannot exclude the possibility that, by applying such strict rules, he will demand compensation. This is why such a secure adoption of high standards is needed.
This, of course, applies when we are dealing with a raw (unprocessed) use of someone else's creativity.

The hidden plagiarism is more difficult. It is a question of rewriting the text with the transformations so as to hide the fact that we are not the author of the entry. But it's a different topic.

Right of Quote

Some of you use the texts of other authors on a quote basis. This is acceptable. Only again. If we copy one and a half thousand words from an article and make five comments every two hundred, then nobody will believe that we want to discuss the text with them. Therefore, in my opinion, we should not abuse this right to justify the copying of texts or works. Because I can paste an article or a chapter of a book and insert every few paragraphs of "I agree". This will not be a criticism, an assessment or a review. So you have to be very careful about how you manage this law.

What about SteemIt

Dozens, if not hundreds, of users upload posts with embedded YT or other movies to the platform. They insert the title of the film as a title, sometimes adding a commentary sentence (more often not). And they collect upvots, i.e. potential financial rewards for these posts. Now let's imagine that the film belongs to a media giant, who investigates the sources of his film's viewing in Google Analytics, finds the SteemIt platform. He comes in search of his own content and sees that the person who uploaded it earns money on it. The legal steps you can take depend on your country of origin and local copyright laws. What he can do outside the law is describe such cases of media - on TV, Internet, Press. And it will not point to one or more users, but will accuse the entire platform. Is that what we want for the platform? So that the media could write that people earn money on SteemIt (or other interfaces) from plagiarism, theft of content. This will certainly not have a positive impact on the image and, consequently, on the value of the whole network.

Let's consider it when the next time you make a post or an article, your sticks will shine over CTRL+C+V. Because if you have STEEM, SDB or SP funds in your wallet, you are a co-owner of this network. And you should care about the growth of its value, not about building its image as a place of piracy, plagiarism, theft and monetization at the legal limit.