I am a fan of sovereign currency and I like the downvote utility.
Perhaps its time to make the downvote into a utility, I have blogged about it in the past but the reactions were very harsh due to the harsh nature of the downvoting.
Downvotes could be converted to plagiarism votes. Instead of being zeroed, the payout would be sent to a neutral wallet that could be designed by lawyers to easily mitigate copyright disputes. if we let the lawyers make that neutral wallet there would be a better chance for outsiders to be able to claim hive, and it would actually create jobs for lawyers who could solicit celebrities whose content was plagiarized on hive.
@rawbe was the one who inspired the idea above so I feel some credit is due to him if this idea is first of its kind for DPoS. He is quite knowledgeable on copyright topics and has good input if he feels like talking