If you use the Internet at any level chances are you have heard of Pinterest. The latest social boom site. The idea behind Pinterest is sharing items, mostly pictures and videos, of things you like. You can create boards of wish lists, likes, lists, whatever and 'pin' things to those boards for sharing.
Now that the popularity of Pinterest is skyrocketing, the lawyers pay more attention to it and are coming in force to ruin the fun. The swords they wield are the every so popular copyright infringement arguments. Big name sites are pushing back on the Pinterest wave and even going as far to force Pinterest to have an 'opt-out' meta tag you can add to a website to prevent it from being pinned.
There are two sides of it that I want to talk about. The first side is Pinterest's Terms of Use of the site and the second is the growing social aspect of the Internet and the legal challenges that are starting to grow.
If you read Pinterest's Terms carefully they contradict themselves and Pinterest attempts to wash their hands completely of any liability of an infringement. In my opinion the terms are clearly immature for a young company and is just a CYA move. That being said here are the two big things that Pinterest says you cannot do.
- Pinterest apparently is not intended for your own personal marketing. Be social but not social about yourself but only post what you own.
- Pinterest says you can't post anything that doesn't belong to you. That applies to everything on the Internet that is not yours.
If everyone followed those rules then Pinterest would be a blank page.
If you read the terms further Pinterest says that they are not liable for any infringements if you pin a copyrighted item. This will never stick since Pinterest provided the means to violate the copyright in the first place and didn't have anything in place to block it. Like the early days of YouTube and users posting everything under the sun, YouTube was responsible to fix it. Pinterest is facing the same push back to control the methods.
Regardless of the obscure Terms of Service Pinterest is going to be squished to nothingness until the lawyers realize the Internet is a social world and things are shared. Whether it's on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Posterous, Instagram, etc... everything now is about sharing. Copyright infringement is not and has never been about sharing outside a realm. Copyright is about protecting the integrity of the material and preventing others to take credit for and profit from said material. Sharing cannot be part of this anymore. It can't be and even if they wanted it to be it's now unenforceable.
It's just not Pinterest, Instagram is a horrible place for violations as well. Just look through the 'winners' of all these Instagram contests and look at their collections. Do you think there are so many people who are professional photographers who are world travelers? Absolutely not. They are image bots and image thieves that re-post other people's work. I know because my work has been shared by multiple people all over the Internet that I found by using TinEye.com. But Instagram has a very limited enforcement for those kind of things. I don't care if my stuff is re-shared as long as my name and website is credited. When others say they took the shot that's when I get pissed.
The solution is quite simple, too simple for a lawyer to come up with it. Make a mandatory link back to the source. If you post something that does not link back to the original source then it's a violation, just posting the link to the photo isn't enough. Pinterest can start the new wave by introducing the link back to everything pinned and from there it can spread. Then if the pin came from a random blog that posted a picture from Reuters without crediting Reuters, it's the blog's problem not the Pinterest pinner. EXIF information can be scanned to get the watermarks, websites, etc... and automatically tag it for the back link.
My point is sharing a photo or video is the Internet now. Sharing content. If you follow the lawyers into the darkness, sending an email with the same photo to your friends is a violation. In fact making a mix tape (for those who remember cassette tapes) by recording songs off CDs and records is also a copyright violation yet that was a billion dollar business for tapes.
I am for adding tags into the EXIF to block social sharing, not specifically to Pinterest but social sharing as a whole. I'm for flagging websites to protect the content. I'd go as far as to change the standards to include this social block. There needs to be an industry acceptance and legal change to realize that things are shared, the old copyright rules no longer apply to this world. New approaches need to be created to protect content if they want to curb it. They can't stop it they can only hope to contain it.
Pinterest will change over the next year. The Terms of Service will be tweaked and the site's functionality will be altered. I'd say if you like Pinterest now, enjoy it while you can, because the direction they are getting forced down will make it un-social and they will lose their original purpose and we will have the lawyers and fear of getting sued in ruining it.
End of Line.
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