DeeCee - 2:05 am on Feb 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

It is my clear opinion that Pinterest in its current form will not survive long.

As opposed to other sites with 'user generated' content, where the site/ISP/hoster can take the prevailing "I did not know" exemption to the laws, provided they act immediately and remove the bad content, Pinterest does not have that option.

Pinterest is both the site AND the tool doing the actual uploading and executing the image theft. Not the actual user. Not the same as when a user upload some unknown image from their hard-drive, where the site can claim initial offense innocence.

Pinterest takes the images from other sites and stashes them in their own databases and pages, so they can attract web-visitors to the affiliate and ad content they are planning to use. As they have now also described on their help/FAQ page:

To fund these efforts, we have taken outside investment from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. In the past, we’ve tested a few different approaches to making money such as affiliate links. We might also try adding advertisements, but we haven’t done this yet.

They list all the famous investors they have on their site, and those investors will shortly want to start seeing a return on their investment. Then the affiliate links and ads will start showing around the images and content lifted off our sites.

What they have also forgotten is that many of those images are licensed from a third-party. And most such licenses cover only the individual site-owner's site(s). Not the off-lifting to an entirely unrelated and unlicensed site, such as Pinterest.