Sunday, March 31, 2013

I Hate Pinterest In March, Too!

Melanie who absolutely loves whiskey has it in for Pinterest:
I fucking hate Pinterest more than a lot of things. I hate Pinterest more than I hate spiders, birds and bad Asian drivers. Pinterest is absolutely RUINING girls lives on the regular and they have no fucking clue why they can't get a boyfriend. I have an idea. Maybe it's because you link your Pinterest to your Facebook and everyone can see how fucking batshit nuts you are.
Confessions of a Curvy Girl blames Pinterest for craft projects that don't turn out as well as they do on the picture. It's not the only site that tackles "Pinterest Fails" but I've largely ignored these since they don't add much to the conversation other than the fact that all these people misconstrue the source of the images as "Pinterest."

Lindsay Markin of The Swim Diva writes:
I don't get Pinterest. I have no idea why someone would want to advertise how much "stuff" they are lusting after. [...] When I want something I tell myself "get it, or get over it".

[...]Nobody else cares what I like, nor do I feel the need to get the approval through other people that what I like is also liked by others.

[...]Pinterest discourages creativity and encourages plagiarism. Instead of actually doing things, it is a self-satisfying act to virtually "pin it" as if one has accomplished something.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Now We Know Who Trolled Who

Back in August, Creators Against Pinterest published Will The Real Troll Please Stand Up, an account of what can happen to content creators that attempt to protect their intellectual property through the legal channels, with parallels to potential lawsuits against pinners. This particular story concerned poet Linda Ellis whose poem The Dash was infringed upon by one April Brown, who found oil for her fire on the website extortionletterinfo.com, operated by Matthew Chan. The website, and affiliate websites, posted derogatory, "photoshopped" pictures of Ellis and devoted an entire subforum to deride and mock her.

A Georgia Judge has decided that the real troll was Matthew Chan and imposed a restraining order as follows:
The Respondent has knowingly and willfully violated O.C.G.A. §§ 16-5-90 et seq. and placed the Petitioner in reasonable fear for the Petitioner’s safety, because Respondent contacted the Petitioner (and urged others to contact Petitioner) and posted personal information of the Petitioner for the purpose of harassing and intimidating Petitioner (1.) As the owner and operator of the site, Respondent has the ability to remove posts in his capacity as the moderator. However, Respondent chose not to remove posts that were personally directed at Ms. Ellis and would cause a reasonable person to fear for her safety. Because the Respondent’s course of conduct was directed at Ms. Ellis through the posted messages and information relating to Ms. Ellis, and the conduct was intended (and in fact did) create fear and intimidation of the Petitioner, Respondent is hereby ORDERED to remove all posts relating to Ms. Ellis.
According to Linda Ellis' blog, Chan
boasted about driving around near my subdivision in a forum with a photo of my home and my address. He posted threats about he and others driving around my neighborhood with video cameras, threats that I was “dead,” threats that he was speaking with people who want to “put me in the ground.” He posted my personal information and records. He called my employee’s home. He posted videos in which he yelled obscenities directed toward me, loudly screaming: “Linda, you’re a piece of __it!” adding that I “won’t understand anything but BRUTE FORCE!”
Following the judgment, Chan has cleaned up the forum of everything Linda Ellis and seems to have reduced himself to mere veiled insider innuendos.

Perhaps, just like we have "innocent infringers," we have "innocent stalkers." In a spectacular example of not-knowing-when-to-let-go, April Brown responded to the judgment with a press release stauchly defending Chan's actions.

Some Do Get It

Janice Heppenstall writes, in Why I Don't Want My Images On Pinterest:
Effectively, then, if I ‘pin’ your images, I am giving away rights that are simply not mine to give, and that you will not be able to get back, and I am very worried about having done this. Equally, if you ‘pin’ mine, you’re effectively converting my ‘All Rights Reserved’ Copyright Notice into a Creative Commons Licence. To make it absolutely clear: it’s not the sharing of my work that bothers me, provided this is done with my permission and with appropriate copyright statements attached; it is the nature of the contract that anyone who posts images on Pinterest are making with that company in respect of my work that is my cause for concern. And this same concern is why I’ve now deleted the pinboards I had created.
I recommend that you read the article and the discussion below for its crystal clarity and the gentleness of the author. A detour to view her beautiful photographs and embroidery projects would be a worthwhile use of anyone's time.

In Reposting The Etiquette Of Attribution, calligraphist seanwes writes:
Does linking to the creator or tagging/attributing them automatically give me right to use their image?

No. Never assume this. [...] It doesn’t matter if it is attributed or unattributed. [...] Linking to the author does not give you a free pass to use their work.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Aiding Copyright Infringement

According to Tim Hull of Courthouse News Service in: No Reprieve for isoHunt in Copyright-Aiding Suit, the 9th Circuit Court ruled this week that the owner of the popular BitTorrent search engine isoHunt.com is liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The owner of isoHunt.com had appealed a ruling from a lawsuit filed in 2006 by several major motion picture companies, and has now lost.

This is a good sign that litigation against Pinterest could result in a victory for the plaintiffs, since, in my opinion, the Pinterest case is even more clear-cut than in the case of isoHunt.com - inasmuch as they are patient with the slow turning of the wheels of Justice.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

I hate Pinterest February Roundup

Danny McMurray's "I Won't Be Caught Dead On Pinterest Until Someone Turns My Corpse Into Candle Holders is an aboslute must-read! Tantalizing extracts below:
The first [reason] is that the majority of Pinterest users are women and the second is that the majority of pins are about, as follows: diet/exercise, makeup/clothes, crafting, “inspiration” for when you fall off the wagon, weddings, and home decor.

[...]

Let’s take a step back to the end of the 18th century and check in with Mary Wollstonecraft. In Chapter Four of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she makes the persuasive argument that women and men are equally capable of reason and intelligence. Pause for a second while you’re out voting, and owning property, and wearing pants and consider that this was a revolutionary concept at the time: people- — both men and women — believed that the female brain was not wired for higher thought. Wollstonecraft suggests that the reason this appears to be the case is because women are improperly educated, that “understanding, strictly speaking, has been denied to [them]” through the forced acquisition of trivial skills like needlepoint, painting, and ornamentation in lieu of cultivating the ability to think.
From Why I Hate Pinterest and Social Media
I may just be one of a very few women who do not obsess over the internet phenomenon that is Pinterest. In fact I avoid the thing like the plague. Oh yeah, I looked at it. Then I started feeling unbelievably guilty.
Free-spirited folkster Rebecca Lynn Forehand writes, in Why I Hate Pinterest:
I don’t need MORE ideas, I need more focus on the ideas I already have.
In How Pinterest Made Me Feel Like A Bad Parent, Audra O'Connell writes:
I hate Pinterest. I hate what it’s done to mommy hood and what it’s done to the psyche of women around the world. Pinterest has helped Mommyguilt reach levels not possible before. Why? Because it shows us what we’re NOT doing, or what we think we SHOULD be doing or what we CAN’T do.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Artist Nixes Pinterest

In Why my art will only be found here, romance novel cover artist Patricia Schmitt a.k.a. Pickyme. writes:
So from now on I will only be posting my art on my web site. I will link to my work on FB and Twitter, but will not be uploading to any social media site again. I just want to know where my art is and make sure that others will not profit off of my work.
I get a warm fuzzy feeling when an artist realizes the importance of distributing one's artwork in making a living.

pinterest pin


Recommended reading on Pinterest in the March issue of Arizona Attorney: Pinterest and User-Generated Content: Website Liability for Copyright Infringement.

Listed are six separate and exclusive rights of copyright owners, with the 4 below applying to image producers:

  • copy or reproduce the work;
  • distribute the work;
  • display the work;
  • make derivative works from the work

It's nice to be reminded about "distribute" and "display," and that there is no provision stating that "proper attribution" absolves infringers.

The article also points out that the DMCA requires that the ISP terminate the account of a "repeat infringer" in "appropriate circumstances" - something that Pinterest makes a big show of, with its fake strike system that never leads to account termination.
However a new "willfull blindness" standard may be applied to Pinterest from being eligible for the DMCA safe harbors.
Let's hope the above comes to pass.