Thanks for the summary Luke.
One thing that frustrates me the most about this whole episode is a dapp owner and Steem witness whom I once believed was doing the best for Steem and supported as a witness, is now saying the ex top Steem witnesses are childish and full of shit because they attack the Steem network. Their view is that the Hive blacklist effectively robbed people of their investment (you can't rob someone of something they don't own). Yet they fail to mention that those who supported 22.888 yesterday are the real robbers, robbing those accounts of the stake they really own.
I fully agree with 99% of these, but there's an attack vector still here to be addressed. We have effectively mirroed every post/comment that the Steem chain had until the fork date, that includes the content on the users excluded from the airdrop... Despite I agree with the exclusión criteria and I am very happy with the fact that we have the appealing process, the content of the excluded accounts mustn't be carried over. This is property of the user who post it, and even though each excluded user still has access their Hive accounts, they don't have enough enough HP to delete this content if they don't want to be on Hive.
This can be seen as intelectual property theft and we should solve this issue ASAP.
Very interesting perspective. Do you know of anyone who would like to modify their content on Hive but don't have enough resource credits to do? If so, please have them contact me. I'm happy to delegate to them so they can clear out their blogs and comments.
The content on the chain is completely open and public. I wouldn't at all consider it the intellectual property of the author since any website can access it and use it however they want (including using it to gain money through ads, etc). Posting on chain is at your own risk, knowing it's all completely public and immutable.
According to the Steemit terms of service, "You retain ownership of and responsibility for Content you create or own ("Your Content")."
Steem is not Steemit.
Still, you can't copy and display other people's content. Forking is essentially doing that. This is an interesting problem for blockchain forks related to content.
But you can. The content displayed on each interface is a copy from the blockchain, converted to html and sent to the browser. Not only that, when it comes to the blockchain itself, anyone can copy the data there and do whatever they want with it. Might they later get hit with a copyright violation or plagiarism? Maybe, but how is that different than a website displaying the chain data? There's also the Ship of Theseus identity philosophy to consider. Which is the “real” blockchain? Is it Hive or SteenTron? I’d argue right now it’s Hive and the SteemTron copy centrally controlled is not legitimate as it doesn’t have the characteristics that contributed to the original content store as that content was posted.
Hi Luke, not sure we've really crossed paths before now but your informative post appeared on my feed and read the comments section and found this comment you made
Now that's definitely an interesting perspective and not something I'd considered before. My understanding when I first joined steem was that having content published on a Blockchain would be able to act as a copyright timestamp and in a way, protect content creator's work but is this not the case?
I embed Spotify links to my music which I publish here via steempress so this revelation is sounding massive alarm bells now
Sure, you can certainly use it as a reliable time-stamping mechanism, even as a form of notary (example). I think that’s separate from thinking you can somehow control how the blockchain content is used. It’s completely public. How would you prevent someone from accessing it?
I honestly cannot remember between the hundreds of comments I have been reading during this last four weeks which was the one pointing out this issue...
About the nature of the content, my assertion is based on something I read about CC0 when I was learning the guidelines of the SteemSTEM community (not so sure how they rebranded the site when they packed and moved from Steem), they made us read a lot of material about copyrighted content ( if my memory serves my well) and there was a section that explained that every post an individual makes is copyrighted unless explicitly stated otherwise... As for the public nature of the Steem blockchain, sure we all know that the content is free for everyone to access it, but it is not legal to make unauthorized copies of these contents. At the end of the day the Steem ledger is not the Hive ledger and the authors posted their contents on Steem.
Actually, I raised this issue today on the Hive discord Chanel, they said that because of the nature of the distributed ledger there was not helping it, we need to copy the text data on each block and that include the authors posts (I know very well how the blockchain works so I understand that, but how this applies to the images we are also mirroring to other storage infrastructure for Hive? There were authors who's post were about photography, and that is the central part of the value of their posts).
I proposed a solution, actually inspired on Justin's censorship... We should grant the ability to each user to make unavailable their contents on the API layer as Justin is doing with the censored post... But the reply was more like I have not been making much sense, that the content each front end displays is responsibility of each front end manager and that each API provider manages it's node as he/she wishes.
I'm not willing to push this further because I have not researched in depth the legal framework of this issue, I just suggested to do this with the idea to wash out some of the dirt the launch of our platform has... Justin's giving us the best of the opportunities to show how we can do the things right while hi's trashing years of dedicated work of hundreds of steemians... But, from what I grasped at the discord, the consensus on this point is that this is not worthy the effort. My opinion is that anything that can be done to distance ourselves from the ill practices of Steemit new and old administration will be great marketing for us. What's your opinion on this?