This is an interesting application of the American system and laws. What you're generally presenting are two tiers of rules.
The difference between plagiarism in art and ripoff as you have presented is roughly the same as the difference between plagiarism in text and spinning. The first is a direct copy, the second is a modification based on the original. This is understood and is a good parallel.
The biggest obstacle in general here is user education. All users are asked to do is give credit to wherever the original source came from. The reason many don't is they're afraid they won't be curated. This is untrue but this untruth has been thoroughly spread through the Discords and through the community. It is likely it's been perpetuated by some curation projects that are no longer active, but it still instills fear among the userbase. Obviously you know as well as I do it's complete BS and a decent curator will still value someone's work even if they properly reference everything.
A secondary issue is cases where a user has reproduced something by a currently active artist who is exhibiting and selling their work. I've had artists in full hysterics because someone replicated something of theirs and now it's showing up due to the strong SEO overtop of their own work. When they sign up for exhibitions or galleries, they're treated as the plagiarist. So all because someone didn't cite a source, the artist loses his or her income. You're probably aware how significant a high-end gallery spot is to an artist that's struggling to get by.
An overarching issue we're facing is highly-organized rings of thematic account scammers that look for every loophole to exploit and develop accounts to resemble genuine users. They typically target the art community because of higher curation; the work they put into their endeavors is minimal as it's an assembly-line type approach. Over the years we've and the anti-abuse community in general has dismantled quite a few of these, although handling them is both difficult and dangerous. Targeted harassment the likes of which most users, even during whatever flag war, have never seen is common when dealing with the most severe of these. Death threats, social engineering, hacking, and everything else under the sun has occurred in relation to these.
Right now I'm personally working on developing guidelines that would clarify the distinction between the above and the more common art hobbyist who, while presenting unsourced art, is not an organized malicious actor.
All of this makes sense, and it was with these considerations I decided to change the rules in OCA.
Based on what you're saying, it seems to me that a huge amount of the issues regarding fighting abuse can be resolved if...
An artist creates a work that is in large part or totally based on another work, they cite that original source.
In OCA, copies of drawings or paintings are currently against the rules at the "State level" and drawings or painting referenced from photos must cite the reference, unless the user is the owner of the photo, or the photo is a product bought by the user. This last exception is for an edge case where some people sell photo reference packs for artists, so it wouldn't be right to post their for profit product online for free.
There of course might be other edge cases or grey areas, but I think with that we can probably fix a huge amount of the issues.
The only 'rule' we ever had, everything said and done, is to just credit the source to the best of their ability. That's it. There was never any other rule.
https://peakd.com/plagiarism/@jaguar.force/art-plagiarism-case-100-caso-de-plagio-artistico-100-chopiliart
On the home page of OCA, pinned at the top, always, is a post that says "OCA Rules", along with a condensed version on the right hand side. With the rules as easily accessible as that, I think it's reasonable that people are aware of them. In all the years I've been on Hive, I've never heard of any rule, but if it's understood now, we can just move forward with that understanding as the base, but I think there's still issues in the degree.
The latest post by Jaguar is a good example. I think it's a bit ridiculous to call this plagiarism as these two works hardly resemble each other at all. The example you used above about the artist not being able to get into a gallery is not remotely possible here. No one would confuse these two.
Also specificity is really important here. I would absolutely NOT say an artist needs to name their inspirations. That's very different from a reference.
This is referenced. I interpreted it in my own way, but ultimately, I painted this photo. There are no major changes in the subject matter or anything additional elements added other than my choices in HOW I choose to interpret it. Under the new rules in OCA, I would post a link to that photo.
Inspirations could include the color scheme, some of the compositional elements, the stylization, the mood, the list goes on, and that is a 1000% normal part of making art. I mentioned it somewhere else, but I'll say again. I think some of you might have a romantic notion of what it means to be an artist. But we're all constantly being inspired by each other and all taking little bits from each other. It's not something artists hide or are ashamed of or would ever need to be. It's literally what you learn in art school.
So were some elements taken from that original source? Yes. The pose, some ideas about the character, but a ton is different. There is no place where this would fly as plagiarism except here and that's harming the user experience.
Lets think about it from another angle? who could it hurt if artists in HIVE cited their photo sources?
Its a win win
I've already conceded that I'll make it the rule in OCA for artists to do that. My last comment is about the conflation of something being referenced directly and something where an artists takes some inspiration from some other source. These aren't the same thing at all, and it's not at all reasonable to expect artists to do that or punish them when they don't.
We all know what a reasonable solution looks like and its certainly not letting abuse go wild.
I think we completely went off from what we were talking about, which is the HW scope rule.