THEFT: Copy-paste of Youtube videos from Steemians

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

I want to highlight a case that I found this morning at an important scale (more than 100 SBD/Daily).

The schema is simple just copy paste videos from several Steemians/Youtubers. No content in the post, simply copy-paste and harvesting on creators.

Here is a short list of impacted steemians for this user account @crypto-p:

If you see other steemians, please notify them.

This user created an account in June 2017, then this user pours a lot of steempower into and continues to do so. 

It is simple to check, go down in the wallet and take the first transactions where you will see this user bought a lot of steem power, then browse the top history of the wallet and check a few transactions.

I do not think there any bot yet to detect this. It is simple to detect for this specific case: an index between urls and posts. You iterate on the content of posts in the blockchain, isolate urls (and normalize them). After you provide some service where you can just query for the url and retrieve posts associated to the given url. It can be useful for creators too if you want to create something unique, and  to know about other people through their contents.

However, I do not know that what can be done to reduce this kind of behavior especially as a minnow. I would be interested to know what you think about it.


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I have upvoted your post and re-steemed it. Thanks for telling me about this content thief. I have left a message under the video that he stole.

Thanks, I like the work you are doing. I hope that it will help to push up content creators like you.

I see your point but I would not call it theft. Those youttube videos can be played in different platforms and embedded in different blogs.
I also have some Youtube channels and would be happy to have more people sharing my videos because it gives me more views, likes and revenue from ads.

I need to tell you a bit more about the context: I discovered this by chance from a trending video from @boxmining. The copy-paste post was sent less than one hour after.

If you like the content you will resteem it.
For some impacted steemians, this user is making more money than they do based on their work.
More important, this user reduces the visibility of those content creators here on Steemit because more upvotes attract more people and it will bring them to the trending/hot.
Additionally with the demonetization issues on Youtube, I think a lot of those steemians are making a major part of their income here, and they will probably use the same word.

Yes, it is theft. There is no indication of the original creator/source, they make it seem as though it is their own content, and they are trying to profit from others work. You have YouTube channels, you know how little each view can pay, and you know how much a single upvote could get....don't you want that single upvote too and not for the person who posted your video to get it. You might get .00000001 for the YouTube view from YouTube and the person who posted your video might get a $10.00 upvote....Is that OK with you?

There's a new bot @originalworks , just put that in a reply and it detects if it's plagiarized... but I don't know if it works for videos.

@OriginalWorks Mention Bot activated by @g-dubs. The @OriginalWorks bot has determined this post by @boucaron to be original material and upvoted it!

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Thank, you. This bot can be useful.

@OriginalWorks does not work for videos or images at this time.

It is something I can take a look at implementing.

Thank you for the details.

Yes stuff like this sucks and highlights the importance of original content. Hopefully, as this platform grows and develops we will come together and find away to combat this and weed out these type of users. Thank you for you post.

Thank you. Yes, it sucks. I saw @louisthomas too, thanks to your resteems.

I share your frustration. I come across people posting other people's Youtube vids and feel like they are trying to make money off of other people's hard work.

HOWEVER, if Steemit is supposed to be a social media platform.... Is it any different than posting a video you found on Youtube on your Facebook account? Surely, one would be allowed to make an empty post with an interesting youtube video and share that with their friends without having to 'steal' it.

Of course on Steemit it is much more clear that they are doing this for financial gain. But still, it's hard to really pinpoint ethically what the best route would be to handle this. One one way one could say they are stealing, another way would be to say they are spreading the news.

I do agree though, this platform does not benefit from empty copie/pastes and reposts, though. I'd rather see some kind of censorship where only owners of videos can post them as content.

I understand your point.
I do not know too what will be a fair and ethical mechanism to handle this. Ownership of the videos is not trivial a thing to prove.
Also you might say that demonetization is another way to perform a censorship, but what to do with such kind of guys ?

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