Have you heard of this guy Zer0hedge? If you haven't head over to his blog on here @zer0hedge.
Evidently this guy is a cut/paste guy. For those of you who are unaware, there is a business/political blog called zerohedge (www.zerohedge.com). What the steemit zer0hedge (notice the difference in spelling, he uses a "0" instead of an "o") does is picks articles off that site, copies and pastes them over on steemit reaping himself a nice windfall.
This guy is the anti-thesis of original content. There is nothing in his posts that are remotely close to his own words. He simply steals the work of others, passes them off as his own, and profits from it. How can anyone in good conscious do that?
Actually he doesn't. Yes he copies it and he does profit from it, but he does not pass it off as his own. In fact, he is very open about disclaiming that he is the original author while posting a link in every post to www.zerohedge.com. In other words, he gives full credit to the site and the original content creator.
Evidently this has a couple people up in arms. They feel that zer0hedge is crossing the line by taking content and profiting from it. Perhaps he is. However, if that is the case, then most of this site are guilty of the same thing,
Have you ever linked a Youtube video on here? Did you give credit to the content creator? Notice I said content creator and not the person who posted the video. Youtube is known for having a ton of copyrighted material and refusing to take it down. How about those who posts MEMEs? Did all of you give credit to the ones who created them? Finally, how about those who put up an article with a couple words then putting up a link? Are they really creating original content?
So why do I support this guy? Simply because I like most of the content that he puts up. Sure I could go to www.zerohedge.com and read it but I prefer to stay on steemit. Is that laziness on my part? Quite possibly although I have incentive to be on here. If that site wants me to read on there, either they can post on steemit under their own name or get with @ned about developing a zerohedge SMT. That might get my attention.
The Internet is the most powerful copy machine ever invented. When you look at it, the very nature of the Internet is to reproduce. Even sending out an email, the most basic of functions on the net is, at a minimum, duplicated 3 times. When I send an email it ends up in my outbox, the other person's in box, and at least once in each person's email host (who knows how many times they mirror and back things up). My point is it is a medium where things are downloaded, uploaded, go viral, can be copy and pasted, and run through editing software and change into something different. Heck, with the blockchain, we are seeing things reproduced thousands of times. Download a wallet to some of these coins and see how long it takes to sync up.
So is zer0hedge a plagiarist since he takes material created by another and simply posts it? If he is, then so is every other person who grabs a youtube video and meme (which most of us have done). There is either a line in the sand or there is not...we are either stealing content or we aren't. To me, we should not arbitrarily single someone out based upon his pasting of a full article when other people are doing the same things albeit not as blatantly.
What do you say? Where is the line? Is a link specifying where the content came from enough? What if you dont know who or where the content came from originally; should you still post it? Or do we just ignore it all since we are on a de-centralized platform? Does copyrighted material even mean anything anymore?
Let's hear your thoughts.
Pictures taken from Google Images...I'll let you decide if they were stolen or not.