Copyright protection on Steemit: How to protect yourself from accusations of plagiarism

Recently, I have seen a significant increase in activity of Hive account@steemcleaners . I have no doubt that copyright requires protection, and spam should be suppressed by all available means. But at the same time I would like to draw attention to some problems that the authors of literary and photographic works, who publish them on Steemit, can meet. I want to say the possibility of accusation in plagiarism and the impossibility of proving anything.

I did not have this problem, but what I see makes me think about it.

I will speak on an example to make it easier.

The first and very important remark. Under the legislation of many countries, copyright arises at the time of creation of the work and does not require registration.

So, I am the author of more than 200 articles. And I know for sure that the texts of many of these articles are in the Internet. I did not post them there. But this could be done by the editors or my students as an exchange of educational materials.

Thus, if I publish the same article on Steemit, there is a risk that I will be accused of plagiarism. Well, if the one who published my article on the Internet, will indicate my name. Otherwise, I can not prove anything.

Even worse is the situation with lectures. Lectures I do not publish, but often I give students a ready-made text. And I sometimes find this text on the web. Most often - without mentioning my name. And then I publish the same text on Steemit. I am absolutely calm because I know: I am the person who fas written it! But then: SHOCK! Hive account@steemcleaners  comes and says: we found the same text on the Х-forum. And hint that I stole this text. And they suggest me to write  them if I am the author. I can write. But what can I prove? Absolutely nothing! 

Photographers who had the imprudence to publish on Steemit photographs that they had previously published on the web (f.e. on Facebook) are in an even more vulnerable position. As soon as your photo is in the net, you can say goodbye to the authorship. If there is no copyright registration, then there is no evidence (although I can easily prove that the registration does not prove anything).

The easiest way for artists. They can easily prove their authorship by taking a photo with their work in hand. Moreover, many of them prudently fix the process of its creation.

And the most important question: what to do? 

We are all adults and understand all the risks of the publication of our copyright works on the Internet. As for the publication on Steemit, I can give only one advice: publish only works where you can prove your authorship. For example, I can show a paper journal where my article was published earlier. The second option is to publish on Steemit only those works that were not previously published on the network.