moTi - 12:38 am on Oct 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

but that's the point: if you aren't big, people won't give you permission to crawl their stuff. and if people aren't giving you permission to crawl their stuff, you won't get big.

if google would have had to ask people permission beforehand to get their content, they had been a non-starter.

same applies to youtube and pinterest. that's why they started out illegitimate. youtube was founded on pirated material, since the founders initially had no content to show to users. even now, being acquired by google, most of their financially successful content is copyrighted by others one way or another.

concerning pinterest:

Photographers would have known off-hand it wasn't a good move for them, and refused. That way, they could have their business without harming anybody.

photographers are the ones that make the difference. exploiting professional content would make a website like pinterest worthwhile. so as they wouldn't be able to get them on board, they let users copy their works. dirty.