Lawyer Deletes Their Pinterest Boards Out Of Copyright Fear

[engine]

Lawyer Deletes Their Pinterest Boards Out Of Copyright Fear [businessinsider.com]

A woman named Kirsten decided to look into the legality of Pinterest. After all, she's a lawyer with a passion for photography.

What she found scared her so much, she shut down her Pinterest boards entirely.

Kirsten's investigation began after she saw photographers complaining about copyright violations on Facebook. She wondered why Facebook could get in trouble for copyright violation and Pinterest couldn't.

She browsed Pinterest's Terms of Use section. In it she found Pinterest's members are solely responsible for what they pin and repin. They must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything.

[incrediBILL]

They must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything.

Wait, you mean a lawyer just hit the panic button because she learned the actual law about copyrighted material usage and attribution that has existed for quite some time?

Wow.

ROTFLMAO

I'm wondering if this is more of a story about what they're teaching in law school these days vs. the Pinterest TOS!

[thirteen]

Why do people trust Pinterest? In order to get invited to Pininterst, you must give them permission to your Facebook or Twitter account.

In Twitter, they can see your account information and they can also send out Twitter messages that will look like it came from you.

[Robert Charlton]

Here's an article related to the above from businessinsider.com...

22 Incredible Images That Show Why Pinterest Gets 1 Billion Monthly Pageviews [businessinsider.com]

The images in the article make it immediately clear why Pinterest is creating all the buzz it's creating. The article also makes me think that Pinterest is very likely to get sued and lose.

No way are the owners of those images eager for widespread exposure on the web. Half the value of such images is their novelty value. Licensors of stock images are frequently asked by potential licensees whether the image has already been shown a lot, and the desired answer is "no".

...fair use. Copyrighted work can only be used without permission when someone is criticizing it, commenting on it, reporting on it, teaching about it, or conducting research.

To satisfy fair use requirements, Pinterest could create an input form that requires a comment before pinning... and perhaps have pinners use the image to search Google Images by Image [google.com], which would prove research as well.... IANAL. ;)

[Leosghost]

10 million pictures, or more, each with the same comment..

"I found this picture, it isn't mine, but I think I have the right to use it because I think it is cute and especially because people will look at my page if I pin it.."

Watermark all your images..if you didn't already..

[Marshall]

Basically, there are three categories of images, what I am calling the 3 P's:
Personal - Those you take and post,
Promotional - Those you do not mind sharing as it promotes a product you sell (and hope to get sales from, i.e. a picture of a wedding gown), and
Profitable - Those you make money from (sell), i.e. custom graphics or photographs.

Obviously, the first are not issues. The third is what can get you and Pinterest in trouble.

Obviously Pinterest has created a sort of "get out of jail free" card by offering the meta tag nopin, but that is only a half measure. It does not prevent someone from copying and pasting. That leads to "how to protect your image" which has been discussed here over the years.

You may think at this point, Marshall, you're just rambling. Not really. For years people have shared pictures in scrap books and wedding or birthday or baby books without the knowledge of the image owner. You would cut a picture out of a magazine and paste it in the book, have a party and say "look at what I found," the operating principle of Pinterest. The only difference now is it is easier to copy and share on a wider platform than you could with a scarp book, and get "caught" doing it.

If Pinterest wants to show their concern over copyright protection, their nopin tag should state not just that the owner does not want their images shared, but something to the effect "images may be protected by copyright and can not be shared without the owner's explicit permission." This would bring the copyright issue to the forefront, an issue, and law, which the general public is rather ignorant of.

Whether it's Pinterest, Facebook, or any other form of sharing, the attitude towards anything on the internet is that it's free for your personal use. Whether this presumption is borne out of ignorance or what seems to be the mentality that "if it's on the internet, it's mine to use," it is this presumption that needs addressed.

Marshall

[incrediBILL]

Watermark all your images..if you didn't already..

The flipside is to put some good old fashioned anti-leech javascript code in your site. There is javascript that makes it damn near impossible to steal an image off a page unless you're real serious and got some basic computer skills. Some photographer sites pop up messages like "IMAGES COPYRIGHTED, DO NOT COPY" when you attempt to right click so people are at least warned.

One of the most hysterical anti-theft devices I saw was a site that put images in the background of table cells and then put a 1x1 transparent gif in the actual cell and stretched it to fit the size of the image. If you were stupid enough to copy his images you ended up finding out, after all your hard work stealing, you had nothing but a big bunch of 1x1 transparent gifs for your efforts.

Don't forget anti-hotlinking code in your .htaccess file. I had some idiots leeching one of my sites to use on eBay once and my anti-hotlinked images I sent as replacements were really bad, they would make anyone blush, and violated their TOS with eBay and got them booted. From what I read of Pinterest TOS, the same naughty images tactic would get people booted as well.

Lastly, one of my faves, a simple big red lettered flashing animated gif that says nothing but "IMAGE THIEF". Had a client once that had his Canadian counterpart literally steal his entire website but left the images, including background images, all linked back to the clients site. We replaced all those images with big bold words like "I'M A WEBSITE STEALING CROOK" and my clients domain "VISIT THE REAL SITE AT EXAMPLE.COM" so on and so forth, and the idiot didn't notice for over a month. LOL

That's how you educate the public with cancelled accounts, annoying pop-up messages, fake transparent images and major league embarrassment. :)

[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:33 pm (utc) on Mar 4, 2012]

[Marshall]

One of the most hysterical anti-theft devices I saw was a site that put images in the background of table cells and then put a 1x1 transparent gif in the actual cell and stretched it to fit the size of the image.

Used this trick. It works well.

Marshall

[numnum]

One of the most hysterical anti-theft devices I saw was a site that put images in the background of table cells and then put a 1x1 transparent gif in the actual cell and stretched it to fit the size of the image.

Could you explain this? Sorry, I'm just not up to speed on this stuff.

[zeus]

well there is still DMCA so if there is a copyrighted image on a site it can be taken down, so no lawyers,..... which i still think its a good solution. Also those who dont want there image spread over the net, place a watermark, have the images on a login page, or only offer thumbs which no one wants to copy anyway

[Marshall]

Could you explain this? Sorry, I'm just not up to speed on this stuff.

It is fairly simple. Say you have a <div> or <td>. In the CSS set the background image to whatever you really want people to see, say blue widget, with the <div> or <td> height and width the same as the image size.

#bluewidget {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
width: 200px;
height: 200px;
background-image: url(blue-widget.jpg);
}

Make a one pixel square clear gif or png and place it in the <div> or <td> with its dimensions the same as the container:

<div id="bluewidget"><img src="clear.png" width="200" height="200" alt="What you would say about the blue widget" /></div>

Using this, method, right-clicking will only get you the clear.png. One would have to look at the source to get the actual image url, but if it is in a linked CSS file, the url will not even appear in the html. And since most browsers default to not printing backgrounds, your image will not print either. And you can still link the clear image if you need to:

<div id="bluewidget"><a href="blue-widget-detail.html"><img src="clear.png" width="200" height="200" alt="What you would say about the blue widget" /></a></div>

Down side - it is a little time consuming.

Marshall

[Robert Charlton]

Curiouser and curiouser....

I was wondering (in a joking kind of way) whether Pinterest might have been set up by the backers of the law firm that's been representing Getty Images ;) [webmasterworld.com...] ...so I decided to google [pinterest getty images] to get a sense of what the Zeitgeist is out on the street.

Google returned "About 4,910,000 results"... one of which was a news story in the GlobalPost [globalpost.com...] following up the story of Kirsten, the lawyer/photographer (yep) who inspired the story that inspired this thread. (Ironically, the story came up for my query because the photo it used of the Pinterest co-founders included a Getty Images credit.)

As the GlobalPost reports, one of the co-founders, Ben Silbermann, called Kirsten and apparently they had a very nice hour-long chat. You can read the full story on the GlobalPost and on Kirsten's blog [ddkportraits.com...]

Kirsten writes great blog posts, but her server is close to melting. The gist of it is that as a photographer she's delighted to have her work re-pinned "if you are so inclined", and most photographers she knows want to use the site to help promote their businesses and "to find inspiration".

Also, she didn't actually close her Pinterest account.. she "merely deleted [her] inspiration boards boards" of pinned material she'd found on the web, at least until Pinterest clarifies the legal situation.

Now, this is where I come back to Getty. Among the pages returned...

Pins from Blog.gettyimages
http://pinterest.com/source/blog.gettyimages.com/

...apparently offering Getty material for pinning. I was surprised. It appears that at least some photographers and some parts of Getty are eager to share in return for the exposure (no pun intended).

But what is the deal if you pull a Getty image from elsewhere on the web?

[helleborine]

I'm very upset with pinterest.

It's another monster that is leaching the life of the webmasters toiling everyday to provide original content.

Surfers don't have to visit my website to view my content, they can do it on pinterest. Pinterest makes money from my hardwork.

I have not noticed significant traffic from pinterest.

[weela]

Opposite experience here, we're getting a good flow of traffic from Pinterest. Maybe our images are just more enticing.

[lucy24]

One of the most hysterical anti-theft devices I saw was a site that put images in the background of table cells and then put a 1x1 transparent gif in the actual cell and stretched it to fit the size of the image.

You mean, the way Google Books started out doing? I think they've now moved on to something fancier. In the beginning you had to jump through serious hoops to get at their page scans. (I'm talking about material that's public domain everywhere in the world, but they made it harder to access than most modern books.)

Wait, you mean a lawyer just hit the panic button because she learned the actual law about copyrighted material usage and attribution that has existed for quite some time?

I think the reference was to P's TOS, not to the actual law. The theory was that it would allow the provider to say "None of our business, nothing to do with us, it's all down to the individual member. Sue their shallow pockets, not our deep ones."