Pirates rarely make money, yet alone ask for money. AFAIK, it's kind of frowned upon to ask for donations for supplying pirated content on most torrent sites. There was a recent dust up over a group doing that very thing.

Here on Steemit people are basically pirating other peoples content without giving them credit or supplying a link to the original content and accepting money in return. It would be like movie pirates removing all of the credits from the intro and putting their intro logo in it's place thereby making it appear they made the movie. It should be frowned upon here just as it is on torrent sites IMHO.

If someone wants to steal other peoples content, go for it, but at least post a message asking people not to upvote with accounts that could monetarily reward them or make use of the coming feature that disallows monetary gains from post.

That's my 2 STEEM.