helleborine - 2:05 pm on Nov 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

I think we we need to keep in mind, here, when talking about "sharing" other people's pictures, is that the problem is truly one of SCALE.

Many webmasters here including Leosghost and myself have invested considerable time (years) to create websites with original content and images of artistic/educational value that have earned us valuable traffic. Some of us have images in the several thousands.

Pinterest didn't invent image copyright infringement. We're used to seeing smatterings of our images on blogs, on FB, emailed, etc. Of course we expect that, and none of this small-scale "sharing" really impedes on our business model at all. It doesn't compete against our website.

There was always the occasional pirate grabbing a chunk of my content and trying to make his own website with it; that's when the DMCA came in handy.

Aside from individual "sharing" to which many of us gladly turn a blind eye and sleep well at night for it, and a few pirates here and there, it was pretty smooth sailing.

The mega-problem with Pinterest isn't a few people sharing here and there. Ben Silbermann created a dedicated copyright-infringement platform (though they changed the wording in theit TOS, that's still how it's understood by its users), that now has 12 millions users that every single day are scraping boatloads of content from the mom & pop websites, and handing this content to Ben Silbermann to exploit and raise venture capital with.

All websites are competitors. We are competing for the attention of visitors. The amount of time people spent on the internet is a limited resource.

As image-minded visitors (Leosghost's audience and mine) can now view our content, and everyone else's best content, on Pinterest, they have little incentive to visit the original websites.

Pinterest is stealing our audience. Which is fair under normal circumstances: but it's stealing our audience with our own content!

That is NOT COOL. That is NOT FAIR GAME.

You want to compete against me? Fine. Not with my stuff, you can't.

Let's stop confusing "sharing" with mega-scale crowdscraping.

sharing =/= crowdscraping