One Week on Steemit and Already Finding My Content Plagiarized!

People weren't kidding when they stated the Steemit platform has a serious problem with plagiarism and copyright infringement. Here I am just one week into giving this platform a try, and already I've found one of my articles from elsewhere on the web stolen and republished here.

Notice the image shows the original vs. the stolen version of the article titled "Steemit - An Incentivized Social Media Platform or a Scam." I wrote that article for my social media organization Strategic Social Networking's publication on Medium back in July of 2016.

A Steemit user by the name of Virendrasinh (obviously a spam account) scraped the entire article word for word, then proceeded to republish it to Steemit with the hopes of monetizing from it.

I managed to find the stolen article with a simple search of the title of my article on Steemit. The thing is, his republishing actually amounted to copyright infringement in the form of content theft, more so than actual plagiarism since he copied the article word for word, including my full name as the author.

Either way, its pretty obvious what the intent was, which was to profit off the work I created.

We're planning to take up the issue with Steemit later this week, and it does appear the platform has measures in place to handle such situations.

This isn't the first time I've found my work stolen and republished on the web, nor the first time I've dealt with issues surrounding copyright infringement. In fact, over the course of the last 5 years of operating news based media brands on Google+, both myself and the moderators of my media have discovered instances of copyright infringement more times than we could ever count.

In the case of Google+, the consequences for such actions are quite severe. Accounts are marked as spam, all visibility is lost accept for the user's profile, and Google's typical response to such reports is to terminate the accounts in question.

As for the article itself, it was my first reporting on the Steemit platform back in 2016, in which the article gives an overview of the platform itself, talks about the controversies and skepticism surrounding it, as well dives deeply into the idea of incentivized social media.

Here's the original: https://medium.com/strategic-social-news-wire/steemit-an-incentivized-social-media-platform-or-a-scam-edceb1064f1a

Since the time that article was first published, I've been bombarded with countless questions regarding the Steemit platform and the skepticism surrounding it. For that reason, I've decided to give the platform a try myself, and plan on reporting on my findings in an updated article that will be published to Strategic's publication in the coming months.

As for those who think they can get away with infringing on the work of others, they really should think twice. Infringing on the intellectual property rights of others opens the doors to serious legal consequences under the DMCA and U.S federal copyright laws. In the case of this Virendrasin user, I've since handed over the issue to Strategic's co-founder, from there a decision will be made as to whether or not we seek legal action.

Written and published by Daniel Imbellino, co-founder of Strategic Social Networking and Gamers Bay! Connect with me on Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielImbellino

Check Out Strategic Social Networking Community on Google+: https://plus.google.com/communities/116564172151613669656