RE: Indisputable Evidence of @akarantain Being an Intentional Art Plagiarist and a Poseur.
I see your point. If you just took it as is, posted it as your own and got lots of rewards for it, I'd send you a friendly warning, asking to reveal the truth and donate the money to a good cause.
If you took the time and effort to draw your own copy, I might actually feel flattered, because it would indeed have to be a considerable effort to do a decent job. I would still try to educate you on copyright and ask you to tell what your source is, but I would not try to make you feel bad about it. Creating something beautiful is hard enough, so I would always try to encourage and if necessary suggest some guidance in the right direction.
I have posted my work on the internet since 1994 if I remember correctly. Its been downloaded and copied countless times. People have shown it as their own. People take photos of it in my gallery and print it out and frame it. There you could say its really a kind of theft, as I don't get the payment I should have for that.... what am I gonna do. I can't call the police every time and so I look at it as a kind of "cost" for promotion. My art is distributed and shown around. OK, not necessarily the way you want, but there is always a chance, that someone who really likes it sees my art and investigates a little to find me and actually purchases an original. It has happened.
In this scenario you have the advantage of knowing it was done. In reality the authors almost never know.
On Steem people are being paid, it is different than someone just taking it and using it in their blog.
I'm all with you! And the fact, that its all recorded gives the opportunity to react. The question remains for me, what an adequate reaction looks like. And of course everyone has their own idea about that.
All I plead for is, what we call "Verhältnismäßtigkeit der Mittel" (proportionality of means).
Therefore I would like to see a distinction between simply taking (with little or no change) and something done with a certain effort involved. I'm not saying to "let go" of wrong doing. I'm saying, lets all go reasonably about it. Meaning, yes, go after notorious violators of rules and community standards. But give someone a chance first to correct a mistake and to learn and improve.
edit:
To me it looks like @lamouthe and @anthonyadavisii have added some valid points, seeing the issue from different angles and bringing two voices of reason into the discussion.
Most people doing this on Steemit will deny they did anything wrong and that it is their work. As someone who fights abuse daily, this is true 95% of the time.
There is financial incentive to every action here. Most are here to take advantage of that regardless of ethics.
It’s hard to prevent that at the same time giving people infinite chances and benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn’t be so against someone if they took another persons work as inspiration and made their own version of it (unless they traced it or used other means that make this trivial) and submitted and disclosed it as such.
If someone is undiscerning, I agree with you completely. Would not have thought the situation is this bad, as I would expect, that anybody in their right mind would correct a mistake, when given the chance. And I'm not asking for infinite chances. Of course there has to be improvement.
I could be completely misjudging the situation, but when a fellow steemian edits a post after being made aware of a wrongdoing, could that not be seen as "correcting" of the very issue? Particularly, when that person from then on respects the rules?
You are misinformed, the user didnt edit those 21 posts when told the references needed to be cited on January 5, the user only did so after the posts were revealed in our reports, almost a month after.
Even if the person would be respecting the rules now(which you cannot assert with confidence), given that it was proven the user lied about the artwork mentioned in the post not being made from a reference image it is well established that the user intentionally omitted to mention it not because of inadvertance but with the intent to deceive. Hence, even if the user would be following the rules now, that fact has no merit or virtue and it is in no way redeeming for there is no merit or virtue in correcting something when forced to.