In the current situation, it is declared that the Steem architecture is somehow an exclusive property of the Steem developer team. This is entirely contrary to the whole underlying principle upon which Steem is based. There might be claims that the architecture is protected by government defended copyright laws, but in the real world, for example Bittorrent, et al, such a claim does not stand up to the reality that if you give me the right to copy something, you cannot limit it, and only if I present it verbatim as my own work, it then becomes an act of fraud.
Beyond this, under Natural Law, this is a clear attempt to exercise force to falsely claim the property of alleged infringers. I think that as the current caretakers of the protocol, sure, they deserve the right to make a living out of it, even to profit handsomely. But no matter what they pray to the State Judges, under natural law they have no standing if nobody has claimed they created the original material that implements the protocol.
Not only that, by lack of any declaration in every post, these posts of users are public domain. Public domain is not a licence to claim that it is your original work. This is a clear case of fraud. But deriving work from it, even copying the whole thing and tacking on a few bits, it's still your work, even if anyone can see that you didn't do most of the work, it cannot be argued that the whole package presented is not different from the original.
Don't tempt the internet to do this to you, please, Steem people. Because they will if you upset them enough. Nobody stopped anyone from copying and modifying only small parts of the bitcoin daemon, what gives anyone else the right to do the same thing with yet another derivative work from the great Satoshi? He never claimed a right to profit over it, and nobody who does not do the due diligence to take care that the system benefits all will not profit off their derived work at the end of the day either.