I think this is a tricky area. It's not so black and white.
There are those on the platform who view the platform as a place for content creators, and those who view it as a place to earn revenue however you can.
No-one owns Steemit, no-one controls it, no-one holds the vision of its purpose and intent. It is whatever people on it want it to be at any given time.
We could go with the majority view - but the majority view is - to hell with plagiarism, show me the money! We cold go with being purist where every image is used correctly and correctly attributed.
But the number of people willing to put in that sort of effort for the returns we are currently seeing is very few.
So we are in a bit of a bind - we want to take the high road, but the high road won't get us where we want to go in the time-frame we want to get there. The low road will get us there, but we'll be covered in muck and stink upon arrival.
Perhaps there is a hybrid option that is workable (I don't know) where content that is original is in one part of Steemit and valued more and content that is in another part of Steemit is known re-hashed stuff which returns much less to the authors.
So people can chose where they want to go and what they want to see.
And perhaps a different reward pool for each as well.....
Just thinking out loud....
There are no rules on Steemit, but that doesn't stop people taking legal action for things like copyright infringement. I know Steemit Inc have to take down some posts, but they may be still visible on the other sites. If you run a web site then you are subject to local laws even if the blockchain cannot be censored. There are lots of people just trying to make money, but one reason we have flags is to deal with behaviour we don't find acceptable. That is our personal choice.