velvet here, long story short, I had been skeptical of this creator on Zora for a while, and today, with the help of Zora’s API, I scraped all of their posts to check how many were "stolen." By "stolen" I mean where they posted a media 1/1 to Zora that had already been posted elsewhere before. I believe I was quite generous in what I considered "transformed" and didn’t count as stolen.

ssss_sa currently has 17 posts visible on their profile. However, the real number is 116, including all the posts they've hidden over time. They've made approximately $1,300 in total. Out of these 116 posts, a whopping 72 were blatantly stolen. Some are artworks from Pinterest, some are album covers, and others are collages from Tumblr. Essentially, they downloaded and posted whatever they liked on Zora.

Now, especially with the surge of short-form content, the line between what counts as stolen content and original work is becoming very blurry, to say the least. However, simply downloading other people’s work and making this much money off of it doesn’t sit right with me. Another reason is that I see people congratulating them in the comments (◞‸◟；) the work isn’t theirs, folks.

If you're wondering about the remaining 44 posts, they’re mostly just memes, either taken from popular meme templates or existing images with a Zora logo slapped on top, with a title as something Zora-ish.

Biggest money they have made from the stolen works are these two posts:

and

They earned $465 for the first and $69 for the second. For the first one, I think the glare or lighting effect was added by them, so initially, I wasn’t going to count it as stolen. Like I said, I was very generous with what I considered transformative. However, they removed the original credit… so, an eye for an eye :)

One funny occurrence was seeing @fascinated commenting on one of the stolen posts calling them out, lol.

Moral of the story: don’t steal.

Or maybe steal, if you want to make $1300 out of other people’s works.