Hi, Harris - thanks for responding. I do think it's important to look out for this, because otherwise the signal is 'Medium doesn't care if we just grab stuff off the web'. As editors, we spend a lot of time reminding, cajoling, remedying this on the part of our writers (and Curation spend a fair proportion of time they could be giving other, more helpful insights into the selection process bellyaching to us about it...) so it's important that isn't undermined.

The John Battelle piece has as its title pic a very generic 'blue sky and clouds' image, of which there must be a thousand on Unsplash. But it has no credit or caption, so there's no way of knowing if it was just grabbed (i.e. stolen) off a website.

That is at the top of the staff picks, so the message it gives is that: Medium considers it fine to post images within your story without copyright info, and in fact may reward you richly for it.

Which ain't a great look when copyrighted work is being ripped off left, right and centre by predatory LLM companies, and the people who create the content for this platform are extremely concerned about it.