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RE: Every GOOD thing MUST come to an end...
yeah I totally feel where you are coming from, these posts are very obviously a labor of love for you. No hard feelings from my end, I felt a little bad even saying it to you in the first place but I spend a fair amount of energy trying to combat plagiarism and copyright infringement here on Steem blockchain. I personally feel it is an important thing to do as someone hoping for a long term future for Steem blockchain. I guess I just hope you can find ways to express love for Fear and Loathing in creative ways without necessarily pasting in whole chapters :) Cheers
you are waaaay overstating the case, carl. geezus, lighten up dude. No court would even deign to hear this, as no harm will come to his estate, or their ability to earn, in fact, fan fiction, even using trademarked and copyrighted material has been upheld as adding to the brand. Get a life.
While of course I won't lose any sleep over what random dude on the internet says, I am curious as to what possible justification you could have for thinking it is okay to paste entire chapters of another author's copyrighted work on Steem blockchain, even if the author was acknowledged. To be clear, this was not "fan fic". There was not in fact one word in this post, before it was edited, that was written by @doc-gonzo. He is of course free to mute me and ignore me. You are also free to say whatever you want. Indulge me in a thought experiment - you would be 100% okay with it if I, without asking your permission, reposted one or more of your own prior blog posts on my own blog and accepted rewards for them, as long as I mentioned at the top that this was your work? And then I just pasted in the entire blog post?
Whether or not a court would hear this case is mostly irrelevant. The question at hand is, do you want Steem blockchain to be known as the home of copyright infringement and plagiarism, or do you want it to be known as the home of original content? I want it to be known as the home of original content. Cheers - Carl
I'm curious to know why you care?
I want to see Steem go places. BTW are you basing your responses here on the meme that is today the placeholder on this post, in place of what used to be here when I made my original comments (this post used to be an entire chapter of the book Fear and Loathing pasted in whole cloth)? Just curious. Because to be clear, I would never in a million years leave a comment like you see here in response to a meme.
Im curious about this "fan fiction" stipulation. I mean, there were some of my own words on there. I introduced the chapter and ran my self promotion stuff. This, in my mind, was just a continuation of an already existing "read along" project I was working through, putting focus on his work one chapter at a time. Because it was just the next installment I didn't feel it needed a huge introduction or anything. So at what point does it step over the threshold of "fan fic" into blatent plagerism? Like I said in my comment to Mark below, I'm grateful for your intervention with my (at the time) current course of actions, but I wonder if there's a way to just tweak the appraoch and be on the right side of the law? On second thought, it really doesn't matter as I'm trying to move on and find a voice of my own.
Fan fic is really something entirely different than what you were doing - fan fic is original writing in an existing fictional world/storyline and with existing fictional characters (although of course novel characters and plot elements can and are introduced in fan fic). Mark is absolutely correct that legal precedent has allowed fan fic authors to use copyrighted characters and to write in a fictional universe that they did not create, but this is totally different than re-publishing an author's previously published work without permission.
Anyone who tries to tell you they know the legal ins and outs of publishing someone else's copyrighted material here on Steem blockchain is either lying to you or doesn't understand the issues - there is literally no legal precedent for this. There hasn't ever been anything like Steem blockchain before. Some thoughts though - legal precedent in the past has come down strongly on the side of allowing pretty extensive use of copyrighted material when the usage was non-commercial - in this case though it would be extremely difficult to argue that you were not trying to profit from the copyrighted material you were publishing here. There is in fact a mechanism that you can use if you want to publish a post on Steem blockchain without earning rewards for it, you just decline payout on the post. You didn't do this obviously so whether or not this was your intent, you did actually profit from publishing the prior installments on your blog. Next, it is extremely hard to say what damages would be found if (more likely when) a copyright holder does take someone to court for earning rewards for copyright infringement on Steem blockchain. If a post has passed the 7 day payout window there is no way to remove that post from the blockchain. It is there, permanently and publicly and uncensorably. A copyright holder can't just file a DMCA takedown notice - or rather, they could - but there is no mechanism in place to actually take down this copyrighted material after 7 days has passed from it being published. I think it is possible if not probable that damages could be found to be significantly more than just the rewards received for posting copyrighted material, considering that the copyrighted material is going to be publicly available now with no recourse to the original copyright holder.
None of this is why I mentioned this to you in the first place, and I think it is beyond unlikely that you would yourself ever see legal action taken against you for this. As I stated above I would like to see more original content on Steem blockchain and less plagiarization / copyright theft. I want this purely for selfish interests - I want to see Steem succeed and grow. The more material that is posted on Steem that has been posted elsewhere online first, the lower results from Steem will occur in search results and it is even possible that Google will eventually stop displaying results from Steem entirely if the algorithm determines that content on Steem is most likely plagiarized. You can actually already see this happening now. I spend a lot of time curating (I am a curator for @curie) and part of this process involves checking posts that I find for plagiarization by searching for paragraphs of the text. Steemit.com already appears to be mostly blacklisted from Google search results. When I do see the Steem blog post I am looking at appear in the search results, it is almost always now one of the 3rd party front ends like busy.org or mspwaves.com - I VERY rarely see a steemit.com result turn up even if I am searching for paragraphs of text that were in fact originally published on steemit.com. This is a real thing that is going on right now - it is absolutely a real battle in the trenches to keep plagiarization off blockchain and find it and flag it down before the 7 days pass and it is too late. The only reason I didn't just report you to steemcleaners in the first place is that it was pretty obvious to me you were coming at this from a place of love for Hunter S. Thompson. Cheers - Carl