As tempting as that sounds...I am not the kind of person who does that.
I see the correlation as this:
A document written by someone else + a few minor changes = plagiarism
A photo created by someone else + a few minor changes= photo plagiarism
If there is no golden standard then the whole system collapses and the reward pool in Hive will be raped just as the reward pool in steemit was.
A lot of people seem to be missing the point that the main issue here is transparency. Most of these methods would be fine if people were transparent about the methods/process. Then people could feel confident in supporting content they think should be rewarded or choose to ignore it if it doesn't meet their standards.
I don’t think I’ll ever be fine with it. If someone stole my heavily coded love letters and got some cooch and $5 payout I would want my cut because it isn’t their idea, work or content that they are reaping benefits from. They would get paid and laid on my words, my thoughts and my work.
Theft is theft.
I’ll tell you a story that shows what I mean.
TRUE STORY:
This is exactly why I stopped holding contests. Where I was giving out money and repurposing my payouts right back to the next contest, to help people out during the second month of quarantine, we had Hive community leaders straight up stealing everything but my name and running an identical contest (right down to the payouts) concurrently with mine in an effort to steer away contestants so that the plagiarist could profit from it. (Ironically the leaders of “Original Content Decentralized” did this)
It doesn’t matter that they made a few minor changes or “stenciled” it after mine. What mattered was that they stole everything, slapped a new paint job on it and attempted to get paid off my work.
They didn’t credit me, they didn’t offer to send the rewards to null, and they didn’t acknowledge me when I jumped in their chat to point out that they interfered with a work of charity to profit from it. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they did any of that because that doesn’t change the INTENT of their actions. Their intent is to take someone else’s work, maybe scribble on it a little and pass it off as their own in an effort to profit.
The situation with the photos is no different.
Removing a watermark, stenciling over the area and adding some hair to the eyes is not original. It is concealing the theft of someone else’s work.
I don’t know how much clearer I can be about why this is still plagiarism.