Clearly this is an issue, but I diverge in my opinion in how the price of Steem is reflective of this particular issue.
Steem, being valued because of the use of Steemit, will continue to fail to appreciate as long as it maintains the weighting of VP by SP. This opens Steem to the regulation of the SEC, as it makes Steem a security.
Further, the mining of Steem has created impossibly huge holdings of Steem that cannot be gained by posting and curating, or are unlikely to be purchased by account holders, except in the attempt to conduct a Sybil attack, which the weighting of VP by SP makes trivial.
This is a fatal flaw in Steemit and Steem, which strongly discourages use of the social media platform for the purposes which most users would like. It potentiates gaming the system to mine rewards, strongly encourages pandering to whales, vote buying, collusion, and etc...
Forks of Steemit are in process presently which seek to create a platform less susceptible to these fatal flaws, which Stinc seems not to be interested in addressing.
Copyrighted content is easily dealt with by simply assigning rewards to the copyright holder. Dtube will do this too, or die. It's really that simple to handle copyright.
Dealing with the SEC, various scams, Sybil attacks, and the like, are also simple, but since the folks in charge of making the necessary changes to Steem and Steemit stand to lose fortunes by making those changes, I am extremely dubious they will make them.
Unfortunately for them, the price of Steem will continue to drive into the dust until those changes are made, and their fortunes will be limited to what they can power down (and sell on the few exchanges that remain available for what looks very much like a scamcoin to cryptocurrency investors) before the price plummets further.