Firstly despite what @jpiper20 has done I commend him for apologising. This always takes guts and we have all done stupid things.
Further I think it would be better to give the rewards from the original post to the actual creator as @katyakov suggests rather than burning them on promotion.
This would be a win-win.
- @jpiper20 makes up for what he has done,
- Steemit gets good PR with the possibility that the original artist might join
- it could get the platform some publicity too
- indeed we could get one of our esteemed authors to do a post on it and donate the proceeds to an anti plagiarism charity or artists charity
- maybe even get a news site or cryptonews site to do an article on it about "the positive way that Steemit is dealing with plagiarism".
The most effective use of a bad situation is to turn it into something positive.
I like this idea as well. I'm just blown away by these new revelations because I just started following @jpiper20 like a day ago and was like "Cool, he is into wake surfing and is really going hard at making content." Hopefully we can turn this into a positive.
I second this. Don't just burn the money. Give it back to the plagiarized authors or community in some way. Doing it this way will also have more of a positive effect between all people involved too.