> Outside of the copyright owners no-one else really has grounds for grievance

Hosting plateforms are legally liable for the content they host. Steem is the hosting plateform and we are its stake holders. We are entitled as a community to decide what kind of legal exposure we want to subject ourselves to, and it only makes sense from both an economic, business, legal and ethical perspective that we do not encourage people to seek income from the work of someone else by violating their intellectual property rights. Note also that although Steem is decentralized, Steemit Inc is a US registered company and they are the ones who will be spammed by DMCA take down notices if we allow the IP rights violations to go unchecked.

are you angry or afraid because your content is someone else creation?

Very good points.

Your two cents is worthlre like 5 hundred bucks =P

>My view for what it is worth, is you're curating photographs and people are upvoting based on your taste and judgment.

Except - too many of Masteryoda post I've seen are _**someone else's**_ curation. 

Going to another person's website and copy and pasting _**their**_ curation, isn't curating.  

## For example [here's a Masteryoda post](https://steemit.com/photography/@masteryoda/2016-underwater-photographer-of-the-year) and [here is the post where he selected 5 photos from someone else's post](http://avax.news/touching/UK_Underwater_Photographer_of_the_Year_2016_Winners.html)

The photos posted are amazing - YES. But unless masteryoda runs [Avax](http://avax.news/) someone else put in the hard work putting them together and writing up commentary on them. 

# Curating art IS a valuable skill people SHOULD bring to steemit. #

Art Gallery curators do a real job - and there are virtual equivalents to that. Sifting through the mountains of material available on the internet and bringing quality content to the fore, even if it is not your own original content is of great value.

But copying other's curation is no different than copy and pasting a Buzzfeed article in my opinion. 

If @masteryoda was transitioning to doing more actual curation with his platform that would be great, in my opinion. But selecting photos from Avax posts alone personally won't get my vote (not that it counts for much).


People are free to upvote, but people are equally free to draw attention to 'copy and pasting' and let people choose to NOT upvote.

He didn't always give attribution, that is more recent. I'm not mad at him for past transgressions, and applaud him for changing to at least giving attribution. Just correcting you on that point so you can more accurately assess the situation.

And again, as far as putting the burden on the original content creator to seek damages when the content user is making a profit without the consent and having made no effort to contact the content creator for their permission is obviously a way to roll the dice in order to make money in the hopes one doesn't get caught. Just because someone isn't aware of a crime doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed. 

Some photographs are public domain, some are expressly free to be used, others are expressly determined to be never even photographed (in the case of something at a museum for example) and nearly all other photographs are automatically copyrighted unless expressly determined to be otherwise. You don't even need to put a copyright next to it, but people on the internet. Just.don't.care. Because they want to make money as quickly and easily as possible.

Your standing up for him has earned you 1700, congrats. *this further proves my point that as long as you support the whales positions you stand a greater chance to gain a financial reward* Which is not to say that I don't think it's perfectly fine to get that much for your comment. You created your comment yourself, it was useful, helpful and worthwhile. Please don't read me wrong on that account.