Nice explanation of copyrights @elamental.
And a good start on the different types of posts here on Steemit.

• Let me start by saying Steemit is great and I am very bullish on it.
  • But Steemit is also very lacking on fairly rewarding effort.
    • As SMTs become available, I think that will make things more fair. Not just having SMTs available, but enterprising individuals and groups who creatively setup specialty types of sites using SMTs.
• As it is right now, Steemit is very frustrating to those who try to provide quality content, referred to in this post as "publishing articles."
  • I think once Steemit splits into different apps with different reward systems (their own SMT), it will become much more fair.
    • For instance, for those into photography, they can have their own site. And the rewards will not be competing here on Steemit with those who publish articles.
• I look for much competition for eyeballs.
  • Currently Facebook and Google are the top web sites of the Internet. Mainly by accomplishing the 2 things I saw the Internet doing back in '95 when I discovered the www: 1) Connect people to people and 2) Connect people to information.
    • So I look for a direct facebook competitor to be started using SMTs, where it's more about sharing other people's works (and I do think it possible to make sourcing the original author an integral part of the platform) and sharing our boring details of our own life. (connecting people to people)
    • I also look for some type of crowd sourced directory to replace Google as the goto site to find information. (connecting people to information)
      Parley is actually a very good start to this, if they continue on and form it into a directory. It is much too temporary at this point, and needs to expand into something like dmoz, if you remember that. Or the original yahoo directory.
    • I also look for someone to develop a wiki based on SMTs to be in direct competition with and to overcome Wikipedia. (again connecting people to information)

One vast improvement to the platform and any sub-platform that is yet to be developed would be to have long term type payouts. Maybe a quick payout of 7 days, but then some way to collect rewards maybe forever. Your work ethic will increase when long term rewards are available for quality content well past the 7 days allowed here on Steemit. People will have a greater incentive to create great articles rather than just posts...

@ned has suggested he expects 100,000 new SMTs within a short time of them being released. That should provide for some great competition and a win-win for both content producers and content consumers.