Steemit idea #??: Digital watermarking of Steemit content

I have heard about and witnessed a fair bit of plagiarism at Steemit. There may be little we can do about the external instances where people steal photos, text and videos from off-site and post them here as their own work, so Hive account@steemcleaners and Hive account@cheetah as well as a few others are hard at work each day.

Yesterday I came across a strange case where someone had stolen a signature. It was a personalised animated .gif made for Hive account@suesa and someone was using it as their own. It was brought to her attention and she flagged and asked the user to remove it.

I am unsure what has happened since but this is the blockchain, her work is searchable and time-stamped. The problem is that Steemit is growing into a large space and finding the instances of plagiarism and theft requires someone to manually see it and recognise it as stolen, which is increasingly becoming difficult.

What I was wondering however is if there can be a line of hidden code that can be applied to content created within Steemit. Perhaps it can be somewhat automatic through a check box and preset field.

For example: >>> original content Hive account@tarazkp <<<

This code could be automatically hidden in each paragraph of text or as often as needs be which means if cut and paste into a new document, the user will get a mention and if 20 mentions suddenly pop up, it is likely plagiarism.

The same could be applied to the images of photographers etc so that at least on the Steem blockchain, it is safe from plagiarism. it could even be different code for different rights, like copyright or creative commons.I know this doesn't solve problems with theft from other platforms. Yet.

However in some distant future, images uploaded here are automatically scanned for authenticity. It may be possible that for content like photos, the photographer can register them on the blockchain without having to post. This could mean that at some point, if work appears on other platforms, it can be traced back to the original owners.

For text, it may be useful if Steemit had a draft function that allows users to create drafts on the blockchain making their work undeniably theirs. I use WordPress a lot for my drafts and have hundreds of unfinished or unpublished work. These are like my canvases if I was a painter. If they were on the blockchain, even after my death they are creditable to me.

There are more and more 'pay for content' sites popping up and the problem is going to come when people are stealing work from authors at Steemit and mirroring them on other platforms as their own. This may be happening already, I do not know. after all, they steal content from other sources and bring them in here. It would be interesting if stolen content generated revenue for the original creator instead of the thief.

With blockchain tech we must be able to at least protect the work and rights of our own content providers, even if in the beginning it is just be raising the height of the hurdle. Having s digital water mark on text means that to plagiarise and reducing the risk of getting caught, extra steps are required such as typing it out or breaking it apart to remove the hidden code.

Again, I am not a technical person and don't know if this is possible yet or ever but increasing the difficulty or stopping theft internally could be a testing ground for a whole range of off-site solutions. Perhaps there is something in here that developers could find interesting to build upon.

Yes/No/Maybe/gtfo?

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]