You'll have to forgive me for missing that one link... I agree that 6 month ago post did not indicate he wasn't Zerohedge but hey at least he linked to the source.

However no matter how dodgy his past his and potentially misleading the name his current posts do seem to be far less misleading. Unless I wasn't really reading his posts at all it would be hard to miss the big disclaimer at all. I think we have to give everyone the chance to learn and reform. He can't really go back and fix the past since those old posts are immutable right (or can it be done with some low level API?)

So for me this is now mostly about copyright violation and what the original copyright holder(s) think(s).

As for copycat names - nope, definitely not saying doing that to mislead people is cool, more that rules are only good ones if you enforce them regularly in a uniform way. If you get lax about it or discriminate people will start to assume no one cares or rules only apply to certain people. Ergo people break laws because they see rich people get away with it. If there were bots and many more of us being vigilant over copycat names on Steemit I think people would get the message.

But it does appear the fake Zer0hedge has learned his lesson in that regard - at least AFAIC.

Note on the flip side some real people on Steemit have been hounded by down voting and robots targeting their profile because there is no reliable recognized way to prove identity here. Clearly Steemit could do better, maybe integrate support for a token or service that verifies identity. There could be a bot for new accounts telling people how to do that. It would make a clear impression on identify theft and provide a solution for identity assertion (@cheetah I'm looking at you)

It sounds like you or Patrice may already have contacted the real Zero Hedge before, did they really have no interest in this reposting account?