It's as easy as a right-click!

This is an easy trick to combat plagirism and fake profile pictures across the internet at large! Copypasta and plagiarism are pretty common problems here on Steemit and I for one am getting tired of seeing steemians profiting from the hard work and creativity of other people while not contributing anything back. There are people making considerable passive income stealing art from places like DeviantArt and posting it on the blockchain without attribution.

Here's how you can use Google Chrome to suss them out!

Take for example this post. They have a number of quotes with a spattering of copy-and-pasted images, none with sources. Quotes are fair game and some of the images look old enough to be in the public domain, so we'll ignore those. This uncited image, however, looks to be contemporary:

To check it out, all we have to do is right click the image in google chrome. When you right-click you will get a menu that gives you the option "Search Google for Image", click on it.

Google will search the internet for every instance and size of the image in question and show us the results in a new tab. In this case, it appears the image might be the work of one Sergey Kritskiy.

Let's click over to his website and see what we find.

Bingo! There it is. It would appear that the steemian who is making money from their post is doing so with stolen artwork. The steemian isn't even giving the artist exposure as there is no citation, and the image is permanently stored on the blockchain for all eternity without the consent of its author!

This step is optional: I usually grab a link to the source by copying the URL where we found the image, and I navigate back to the original steemit post and let the author know they are gaining at the expense of another. I will often report a case like this to the Hive account@steemcleaners . There's a bunch of info on how the steem cleaners work in their post here.

I hope this method of image searching using Chrome serves you well. It's useful in other instances besides Steemit too. Verifying the authenticity of pictures of an alluring man or woman on internet dating sites is just one...
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In closing, the choice to flag, reply-to, or report on posts like these is a very personal one, but I think we all need to do our part to combat plagiarism on steemit. Please think twice about resteeming or upvoting posts with images that don't have sources. And please use rights-appropriate images in your post and cite their sources! There are lots of places to find creative commons and public domain images, several of which can be found here.

The top-most Image is public domain but the source and a great article may be found here

Thanks for reading. Keep training, and keep up the good fight!