Standing Together Against Plagiarism
Many issues divide the greater Steemit community, but the one thing most users agree about is plagiarism. None of us relish having our work stolen and monetized by intellectual property pirates. There may be differences of opinion about how to handle plagiarism, about how much priority to place on managing it, but few successful Steemit users would put their stamp of approval on it. Centralized, decentralized, FIAT, or crypto—nobody likes a thief.
People Who Set Examples We Can Follow
Lately we’ve seen some great initiatives launched to combat plagiarism, and since writers are often affected deeply by it, we support community efforts to fight it. We’ve watched @themarkymark take a stand against it recently, and his results are gratifying. So a heartfelt thank you to themarkymark, with a hat tip to @ipromote. We’d love to see more of this kind of pushback within the community, people with larger accounts getting involved in the fight to make Steemit a place we all want to inhabit.
@Patrice does a great job with Steemcleaners and all its ancillary projects. It’s hard to imagine what Steemit would be like without the services and support she provides. She stays busy, though, and has to “triage” Steemcleaner activity based on relative importance. A lot of smaller “problem” users are slipping through the cracks, which allows plagiarized material to find permanence on the blockchain with no repercussion. The Writers’ Block has a lot of members willing to lend flags to stopping this, but while we do have a certain strength in numbers, we can only handle less powerful accounts.
Flagging
Flagging is not our primary objective at the Writers’ Block, but stolen content requires a different level of response. We encourage the greater community to step up as well, if you find plagiarized material. Flag if you feel you can do so without compromising your own account, but definitely report stolen content. That’s the only way we will ever send a message to abusers of this platform that such behavior will not be tolerated.
Reporting to Steemcleaners
There are a couple of methods for reporting plagiarism with Steemcleaners. You can summon Steemcleaners by tagging them in a comment @ Steemcleaners. However, you need to be comfortable with tagging the offending post in the comments and essentially calling them out. If that’s not your cup-a-tea, then you can also reporting to Steemcleaners by going to https://steemcleaners.org/abuse-report/ and simply fill out the form. The form will be submitted to Steemcleaners, without the thief’s knowledge. By engaging Steemcleaners you have an opportunity to collect a reward for submitting.
Reporting to Submarine
Submarine is a smaller, less powerful account that is currently targeting plagiarist and copypaste activity falling below the Steemcleaner's radar. It employs a manual voting trail of people who follow the "torpedo" posts and add their SP leverage to the downvote. The best way to notify Submarine about suspicious account activity is to simply tag them in the comments of the questionable post. There is no bot involved in Submarine investigations or posting activity.
We Are All Affected By This
Plagiarism is a serious issue. It’s one we take to heart at The Writers’ Block. There is no culture, no wallet size, and no excuse that will ever make it okay to profit from someone else’s work. Please stand with us in discouraging this unacceptable practice.
Plagiarism is a menace that must be curbed within the steem blockchain. Plagiarism is equivalent to theft and robbery.
I hope this is put to a stop on the steemit blockchain
Thanks, I didn't know about @submarine (maybe tag them in the article?).
Our community (#classical-music) is just starting to deal with our first plagiarist. For us, it is tricky, as he steals audio and then passes it as his own...
I'm curious, do you need proof of plagiarism when feeling out forms and tagging and flagging? I feel stealing someone else's work is theft, but as crime grows here and more vigilantes step up, is there a chance good people are going to get hurt by false claims? Will people purposefully tag another's work as plagiarism just to see them go down?
The forms require links to the material that is being stolen. So you can't just fill it out without providing some proof. Both Steemcleaners and Submarine are very thorough and either can be approached if something is believed erroneous.
Ok, so once they have the links, is there some sort of algorithm they perform to find the original to compare it to?
@thwwritersblock well said but just sadthat @grumpycat would call sometimes my work even of theyre writen by me.yet indeed we should avoid this
This I 100% agree with. STEEM would get ruined by plagiarism. I don't just mean quality of the platform. As @bobinson described here: https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@bobinson/scenario-dmca-takedown-of-steem-blockchain
We have a risk at getting labeled along with piratebay.
There's a difference between Lying (claiming you created something which others have created for you, clearly) and Stealing Intellectual Property, One is a reasonable and the conclusion drawn from logical consistency, the other has a lack of sense, or logic and is a complete absurdity and infringement on Freedom of Expression. So, in other words, many would not put their stamp of approval onto your witchhunt, in fact, a Year ago @dan left for seemingly better pastures after telling the community how he is AGAINST Intelectual Property and how the License for steem is meant to be Completely Open Source, so that if people want to monetize it they can. He and many other have voiced the same opinion, and considering that you're walking into possibly the largest anarchist community on the internet it's no wonder that your post barely got any traction for people who have been here a while and least from people that align with @dan and many others. If you want to verify this go to @dantheman and scroll down in the blog to the Deleted one (a year ago) and you will understand, especially if you follow through and read the articles linked.
What we are all affected by is fraud!
Bid bot operators running small bid low $ operations which pick up 0.1SBD bids and neither upvote nor refund, often making all kinds of cockamamey excuses. Run this 10 TIMES A DAY and those little $$ add up.
The Feds don't give a damn about writers and 'content creators' being ripped off but they love nothing better than getting their teeth into potential 'wire fraud' or conspiracies to commit wire fraud. Especially where cryptocurrency and blockchain is involved. If Steemit doesn't get its act together and close down these fraudsters the Feds might just decide to pull the plug on the servers and the 'vision' ends
If anyone can tell me a site constantly monitoring and naming fraud bots I would be more than grateful
Actually, many of us are NOT affected by fraud, simply because many of us don't try to use bid bots. This is a simple solution to that problem--quit trying to use them and you will no longer lose money to them.
Plagiarism, however, steals from the reward pool as well as stealing from the people whose content is stolen. Many of us have seen or know someone who has seen someone else's content be stolen on the block chain, not to mention the huge volumes that are stolen from other resources.
Why not start this resource you want so badly yourself? Make a series of review posts of different bid bots.
Meme plagerism is the worst, especially when its hitting $46 a post on dmaina.
🗅
I really dont understand what you mean
But apparently 62 voters do
Please do me a favor and expain what blacklisted anybodies being scammed has to do with bidbot rip-offs? And stopping it
this post has nothing to do with alleged bidbot rip-offs but that didn't stop you from spamming it with your off-topic bs
Good work!
However, I'd like to object to (or get informed on?) a part of steamcleaners algorithm... Namely, regarding dtube videos and wikipedia entries. I've got another channel which is dedicated to finding and uploading various obscure yet worthy films and documentaries which aren't easily available elsewhere. As a filmmaker myself I consider it a kind of educational pursuit, fair use etc and of course if copyright holders object or the material does get readily available again I'll gladly take it down.
So anyways, steemcleaners... I place wikipedia quotations on most of the videos and I often do get tagged by the steemcleaner bot for the effort. In this case, I don't believe that this can be called plagiarism because the main content isn't the post but the video itself. On some videos I do add a comment of my own but for pure facts I do rely on wikipedia. If these videos are for educational purposes then some informative text from authoritative source should be welcome.
So is there a way to avoid getting tagged by the bot? Maybe a way of formatting that I am not aware of? I simply copy paste wikipedia text and drop "/wikipedia/" at the end of the quotation. Could it be simply the problem of formatting?
Try reading the Abuse Guide provided by Steemcleaners. That would probably explain why you are being flagged.
Yeah, thanx. I did a bit of reading and managed to clean up my act (mostly a matter of formatting, duh...) It seems that linking to the original article the quotation comes from is all it takes.. And a few words of my own.
When batch uploading I usually put only the quotations in the original post, leaving my own comments for later revisions (otherwise it gets all messy, having to switch from technical uploading job to creative writing one... it's hard on the brain. Not to mention that I usually do one at my desktop while the other is usually done in a cafe with a laptop). But the bot gets me in the interim.. it's too quick! Seems I'll have to adapt my workflow for Steemit...
like I've said in regards to other posts about intellectual property theft on steemit - I love how there's members of the community striving to keep people honest and holding them accountable...... But try having your writing partner take your script - change the names and locations - get it registered with the copyright office with them as the only writer - and you can't sue because you have no proof of anything because you worked on everything locally at their house and communicated via landline because they had no cellphone - it was 10 years ago. Last I heard he had the script optioned for like 10k...... But he's a massive coke head - still works at pizza hut and lives with his mother. Not even mad. Rant over.
You could write a script about it - and nobody would even rip you off! That's how grim it is.
Now you know a contract signed in advance of any 'collaborative' effort can be worth its weight in gold.
So at least you get to share in the option money.
After that you will both be robbed blind by the producer.
Who will then be screwed by the studio and the distributor.
Awesome post! It helps to communicate the issues on Steemit as a way to clear them up in the community.