Hi @juliank , I have participated in your photography contest once but did not win. There were photos which were better than mine and there were photos which were not good as mine on the winners list. Yet I was happy since it's a human selecting the best photographs not a bot. You always took great care to select the winners.
Views on cheating
I'm a non-westerner and as a native Asian, I completely agree with you that we are more into plagiarism and cheating and yes, it is more of a cultural thing.
Suggestions
Can you use your influence and design a bot to check copied photos from google? Or maybe you can use one of your Steemit friends or I would be happy to help you check the photos authenticity manually.
One other way could be having a professional photographer on the panel to help you catch these cheaters.
Final words
I'm a minnow but I would be glad to help you or support you in anyway I can to stop plagiarism
In the end it is still subjective since I am judging yes ;p
It should be somewhat possible to detect plagiarism with a bot, but also in that case there can be false positives. A lot more professional photographers are joining the eco system and they tend to share on multiple platforms and have their own websites as well.
Yes, that would be a huge problem for some of us, because I have images with stock agencies and art sites. My images are also being used all over the web (sometimes legally, and sometimes not) but a bot could find one of my images on say WEb MD (legally paid for) and assume that I was stealing the image from there!
I want to follow this race, but I do not understand how, I have a lot of interesting photos, because I am a photographer from asia, thanks his enlighteners