Yesterday, I randomly decided to go to the “Ukulele” tag. As I mentioned in a Post last week – I’m always looking for new musicians on the platform that I can encourage and help out. I wasn’t sure if anyone else actually uses the ukulele tag…but I thought it might be a fun way to find fellow uke players! I was pretty surprised to see my FACE and TITLE on someone else’s post.
Here's a shot of the stolen content – it was my ukulele cover of “Cheap Thrills” by Sia
The post didn’t make any money, so I wasn’t overly upset about it … but does that make it any better? This was not a post saying “Hey – go check out this Ukulele Player!”, it was literally a copy/paste of the text from my post and a link to the Dtube video. The funny thing is, that the link clearly shows that the video was plagiarized because it takes you straight to my Dtube Channel.
This was an obvious and poorly done plagiarism job… because the cover art shows my face and the video links back to my post; but what about people who post mainly written content and use photos that aren’t personally identifiable? How horrible would it be if someone ripped off their post and ended up getting paid for it? The people voting on the plagiarized post, may have no idea that it was ripped off. They would just see a well-written post by a new user and might decide to support them with a vote.
This Kind of Behavior Harms the Steem Eco-System
We are a pretty inclusive and accepting bunch – but stealing others content is completely unacceptable. It really degrades everything that the rest of us are trying to build here. It just makes me scratch my head, because even if their scam worked on a few posts… people would eventually start to notice all of their content was plagiarized and they would get down-voted to oblivion. What’s the draw? I’d love any insights you guys have.
What Can We Do About It?
How people decide to deal with plagiarism will be a little different for everyone. I used to be shy about downvoting because I didn’t want to waste my voting power on people that are not providing value. I’ve had a bit of a shift lately though as I’m starting to think that this may be the best way to send them a message. I’m still not spending very much of my vote power on spammy or plagiarized comments/posts… but even a little nudge can hopefully be enough let them know that kind of behavior is not appreciated.
Message to Plagiarizers
Please stop. Seriously, you are not doing this community or yourself any favors. You have a voice, and we want to hear form YOU. Please use it.
What do you guys think? Is there value in calling out plagiarism and talking about this more openly as a group… or am I just encouraging plagiarizers by even acknowledging them? I honestly grappled with this and would love to hear your thoughts.
Xo, Lea
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS