I agree wholeheartedly. If we don't police this behavior ourselves Steem will be viewed as a place where people come to steal IP and make the network an enemy of companies who rely on it. The US government takes IP extremely seriously.
Also, people who upload would be remiss to forget that the blockchain is public like Bitcoin. All of these transactions will lead back to the person(s) who posted them.
It's not really possible to police this within the community because nothing that the community does will change the fact that the publishing rules have been broken on the blockchain. The only solution is really to change the software to support some kind of automated system for the purpose.
Does dtube store the content on the steem blockchain though, or just link to it?
Dtube uses a distributed network of nodes, similar to the way that BitTorrent works - so all that is hosted on the blockchain is links to those distributed files. However, that is not enough to protect those responsible from prosecution - as demonstrated by pirate bay etc.
Thanks for the clarification. I know early on in bitcoin's story there were people concerned that a bad actor could post some child porn into the blockchain, leaving anyone who used bitcoin from that point on open to charges of distributing it.
Happily that doesn't appear to have eventuated.
Ultimately, I think while the rules of 'law' might be able to be interpreted to generate a prosecution for large numbers of users of a network just on a tenuous connection such as you suggested - in reality, there will probably be some 'common sense' used and a recognition that the intentions of those running the network is not to break those rules and that they have just gotten caught up in it all by offering a public service. I also think that despite claims to the contrary, Bitcoin is more traceable than the average distributor of criminalised material would be comfortable with.