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RE: @dmania is BAD FOR STEEM - rewarding plagiarizers and thieves!
Hmmmm, https://reddit.com/r/dankmemes
It may be something accepted by the whole of society, but it doesn't make it right. However, it's not something that can be demanded of every memer, since memes were born from unattributed modification and usage.
They were also being passed around for free. Nobody was getting paid. I recently read how the owner of the grumpy cat photos was rewarded nearly 1 million dollars in a lawsuit of sorts. That money has to come from somewhere. Since money is now involved here, it's a slippery slope. Since some of us use pseudonyms and can't be easily tracked down, those lawyers who make a living looking for ways to sue people would just go straight to Dmania. If you're running a business, it's only common sense to have all of your ducks in a row.
It's not a business.
What is it?
It's an Entertainment, it's an Education, it's Community Forums and more than anything it's a Co-Op.
Copyright infringement doesn't have to be profitable for it to be copyright infringement. Money needn't be involved at all. You're right that people often don't take interest until money is involved, but it's still copyright infringment to steal Grumpy Cat's likeness whether you're getting 10 SBD from it or whether you're getting 100 karma on reddit.
You don't steal the Intangible, it's reproducible without any effort on your part, when you Make up a Dance and then claim that others owe you credit, however small or it's "copyright infringement" they can roll their eyes knowing that monopolizing ideas is counter to freedom of expression and let you try to extort them for expressing an idea.
I agree philosophically, but that's not how law in the USA works. You and I might roll our eyes to see posting unlicensed Grumpy Cat memes be considered a form of "stealing", but that's how intellectual property law works.
I don't think the law says "stealing". Copyright laws have words that make more sense for the topic, such as unauthorised copying, reproduction, unlicensed distribution, etc.
Yeah, that's why you have to keep it PLAIN because Unauthorized copying means Stealing. Or when the judge calls you up you ask him to his face if he could clarify what unauthorized copying means, because it's clearly Stealing of Work. Licenses by definition are there to allow people to do what otherwise is ILLEGAL AND UNLAWFUL (both).
Let's say I'm poor, I write every day, and I'm trying to make money by publishing one chapter a day in a premium site such as medium.com (where the readers have to pay a subscription fee to read unlimited publications). Every time I get a view and a vote, I get money. It's similar to here except all votes are worth the same.
I don't want someone's blog called "read medium for free" to re-publish my work. I would lose my profits because less people would pay to view it (why pay if it's available for free?).
Therefore, I choose a solution: I adhere to copyright laws and I publish my chapters under a License that says "you shall not re-publish this work without my authorisation".
It is simply a compromise that I hope will be fulfiled. Ideally, this is not a law but setting things straight with my readers. If one of my readers chooses to re-publish my work, they would be directly harming me and breaking the compromise.
I would then immediately cease to publish those works because it is not profitable anymore. My readers who do pay would be harmed, but I would have no other choice since I'm not making enough to make a living out of it and I need to look for another source of income.
A License here is a protection measure set toward the producers of content.
This can be extrapolated to copyright laws: they are there to protect the creators of content from the possible incursion by consumers in the unduly usage of the content (which would ideally be only things that harm the creator and the integrity of the content, such as reputation, income, etc.)
I wouldn't want someone to print it
If I publish a chapter to my novel everyday for the next 100 days and I want people not to print my chapters and sell them themselves because I'm trying to make money out of them (i.e. I'm doing it because I need the money)
Because you need money you think it's right to limit people's freedom of expression. Copying is Stealing, except that it's not. And Licenses are always for doing what is UNLAWFUL and ILLEGAL.
Tell that to @grumpycat LOL
So what do I care, those are PRIVATE LAWS. Read the fine print, you think Citizen and Sovereign could ever describe the same thing?
USA be damned!! Another faceless corporation
Check artopium's response below for a lawyer's view on the image plagiarism issue.
I still believe original content producers should be rewarded while the plagiarists get nothing. There's enough bad press about anything cryptocurrency related. Some people still think it's a dark web tool to purchase guns and drugs. We don't need to follow the same road as napster when we already know the outcome. That's the part I think @artopium is missing. Lawyers step in, the media steps in, the place gets a bad name, all of these investors lose. It's simple stuff and we've already seen what happens in the past.
I agree with your view. It would suck for that to happen to Steem and to the blockchain in general. But today we're in the age of uncensorship, whistleblowers, freedom of information, insurgent journalism. This is just the logical consequence and it is bound, regardless of our choices today, to keep growing in that direction.
And it will be accepted by the hivemind because it will theoretically allow journalists to publish undeletable work, uncensorable words. Imagine a perfect Wikileaks or a clearnet Tor. I think that's where Steem leads no matter the efforts toward cleansing the improper content.
I myself am working on a search tool for the blockchain. It's not advanced at all, but it would allow to get low rep and high rep results equally. Votes would not matter much in the end if this succeeds.
Those journalists would be publishing original content. I fully support having freedoms and the benefits that come along with a free and open society. History shows us those who abuse freedoms are the ones who typically ruin it for everyone else. People can protest, but as soon as someone starts smashing windows, they all get the pepper spray. That's an abuse of freedom. Just because the windows are there and just because they can be smashed, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to smash them. Embrace freedom, enjoy it, there's no need to abuse it.
Well, then memers may demonetize their work if them want to meme. Posts in the steem blockchain are monetized.
I have to agree here. Memes in essence are pretty much stolen photos/images that the creators (of the memes) have no rights to. These then spread all over the internet and it seems as if no one cares about the origins of the contents. Posting to Steemit however is different straight away, as everything here is monetised.
There are some good incentives here to create original memes (such as competitions), but they are overwhelmed by the amount of non-original/stolen memes. I have always disliked memes, but DMania is a new level since everything there is automatically monetised.
I think people view it as an easy way to make money. Posting memes (and those daily quotes which have just been taken off the internet...) is about the easiest thing you can do to attempt to make money here.
They could, but they probably won't. Rules are such a fickle thing in the face of social acceptance.
I agree @cryptosharon. Pointing figures as to who stole what image first is in and of itself a slippery slope. And to settle the debate: because I've personally dealt with lawyers involving copy rights as well as unauthorized publication, no lawyer will take any case to court unless damages can be proven. The prosecuting party must show how they explicitly, and monetarily suffered from the direct actions of the offending publisher. In other words, stealing an image and making a few dollars on it is not enough to go to court, even if it does technically violate a statute. The original owners have to demonstrate in court how this negatively impacted their own finances.
so , what should i do ??
If Copying is Stealing.
of course no , copying is copy , and stealing is steal , good luck
and your comment doesn't say anything
I didn't say 'stealing', I said 'unattributed modification and usage'. I could have added digital reproduction, but that's obvious since we're talking about memes.
Therefore Unattributed Modification and Usage is in the context of Stealing Ideas, it cannot escape being in that context, or it resolves to be the UTMOST pettiness that can be demonstrated: To WANT attribution and Notice if someone changes your idea, as if you thinking of something makes it EXCLUSIVELY yours, regardless if it's a recipe, a dance or an illustrative representation.
The usual usage of that "notice" is not to tell the author that their idea has been reused but to ask the author for permission to use the idea. It is petty, but humans are self-centred and self-interested. I surely am.
Going back to research, Let's say I spend a decade working on thousands of monkeys, secluded in a laboratory in dangerous conditions, trying to identify the gene that causes early-onset Alzheimer's. Let's say I get a satisfactory result and write my words in a Word document in my computer. But there is someone in the building to whom I've trusted my thoughts and well, he thinks that he would probably get a nice monetary reward if he published my words first.
So he hacks into my computer, extracts the document, sends it to an editor, then to the Nature magazine, and here I am sitting in my lab, having used all my life for what I wanted, but I get no attribution for my work. I will spend my years in solitude while my friend spends his life in conferences and luxurious hotel rooms describing to scientists my experiences as I told them to him.
It's not a dance or a recipe, it's work that requires time to create. It's an investment that is easily devalued by the indifference of others toward the expected compromise of exclusivity.
THen you deserve the war, famine and hate that the world is filled with, reap it.
Then make better friends.
Then make better security protocols.
Why did you want to do all that research? To get compensated, get famous? can he ever STEAL the idea, do you go without ideas once he takes it? Can you not continue that research? It's not ok to go into MEDICINE, SCIENCE with the ultimate motive to make BANK from your fame, and discovery. Go chocke on a microphone to a pop beat, that would be much more lucrative, and let the people who invest their own talents into researching cures for Alzheimers do it simply to find the cure, and any compensation afterwards would be the icing on the cake.