Zero Tolerance For Desperate Hipsters

My Hipsters screenshot has Hitler with headphones.
Probably not the best of omens.

Hipsters.com is just another unabashed Pinterest knockoff that's been foistered on the internet by parasite Sumon Rahman who has purchased one of the many "Pinterest-In-A-Can" programs available and installed it on a server. The knockoff even has red pin icons, and the "organize and share things you love" motto. The funny thing about this one is that Mr. Rahman created a Hipster.com page on Wikipedia, that was promptly deleted by the Wikipedians, who are not known to take guff from self-marketers.

Crowdsourced content scraping could have been invented 15 years ago, but it wasn't. Back then, webmasters had respect for copyright. Probably not because of some knowledge of the law, but rather, basic human decency. Whatever scraping activity there was, it was never conceived as legitimate, possibly not even by those that perpetrated it.

It took someone like Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, who is, in my opinion, an extraordinarily amoral, unscrupulous and shameless individual to breach through this culture of human decency and blaze the trail for his Cult of Image Copyright Infringement. His hideous contribution to the web is crowdsourced scraping.

And this is the reason why I have introduced you to yet another Pinterest clone. To drive the point home that some artists may be resigned to Pinterest's existence, stoically taking another hit to their ability to make a living, shrugging it off and moving on, letting themselves be mollified with nopin metatags, contented with a nofollow link and attribution, deluding themselves with the hope that Pinterest can be used as a promotion tool: these artists fail to see into the future. A future where not ONE successful copyright infringement platform need be contended with, but hundreds and hundreds; some even worse than Pinterest like Spark, that scrapes both images and text at once.

There must be zero tolerance for crowdsourced scrapers. There is no room for reluctant "I guess it's OK if..." - there ought to be no "ifs." Zero tolerance.

Unrequited Love At Loveit.com

Pinterest is little more than a dumb platform based on crowdsourcing the scraping of visual content without having to pay anyone a cent, except perhaps a handful of lightweight programmers and high-power attorneys; it was simply a matter of time for other crowdsourcing content scraping thieves to start to elbow it for a piece of the action. Pinterest, for a time, was ahead of the game by providing a central display of third-party image content, which was until then scattered on the creators' websites. With many viable competitors now entering the arena, the visual content is now trending back to its original scattered state, only on image scrapers rather than the creators' own websites. Yes, this is ironic.

Launched in mid-May 2012, Loveit.com is such a viable competitor. It outshines Pinterest in terms of sheer arrogance.

Mashable quoted LoveIt’s CEO Ron Lapierre:

We clearly call out in our Terms of Service that the content you bring into LoveIt is yours…We don’t claim any ownership of the content and you’re more than welcome to move it or share it on any other site you choose.

Yeah, right. Just like Pinterest, they have a one-click infringement pinmarklet-like tool which is called +Loveit - blowing any pretense that Loveit isn't just yet another copyright infringement platform right out of the water. It's just a variation of the no copyright infringement intended disclaimer.

• Loveit.com shows large "thumbnails" at 220 pixels wide.
• For now, unlike Pinterest, Loveit's links to your website are normal links, and not rendered worthless by the addition of the "nofollow" attribute. This may be a temporary lure, until they can legitimately use spam prevention as an excuse to use the "nofollow."
• Loveit.com's domain name is cloaked by a privacy service. One cannot investigate ownership of the website by normal means.
• With Loveit.com, you can select all images on a given page - copyright infringement on steroids!
• Image uploads from search engine result pages are welcome as always.
• With Loveit.com, you can upload multiple files from your hard drive.
• Like Pinterest, Loveit has an EMBED code generator to propagate the infringement to fourth-party websites.
• Loveit.com has private/group settings making the infringement more difficult to detect.
• That's not all! There's a PIN IT button on every image uploaded to Loveit.com!!! The copyright equivalent of the multiplication of loaves and fish.
• Guess what? Like Pinterest, it's hosted on Amazon's servers! Indeed, their abuse contact email is at: ec2-abuse@amazon.com.
• Loveit.com, perhaps wishing to make a user's transition from crowdsourcing for the ultimate benefit of Ben Silbermann and his venture capitalists, to its own benefit, "a frictionless experience" has a tool to faciliate mass transfer of images from Pinterest to itself.
• Like Pinterest, Loveit features "/source/" subfolders where the aggregated content from a single website is displayed. There is a large one for Pinterest: http://loveit.com/source/pinterest.com. Like Pinterest, further pages of aggregated content can be acessed at http://loveit.com/source/pinterest.com?page=2 and changing the page number in the URL. Of course, the reciprocate page of loveit.com content aggregated at Pinterest can be found at http://pinterest.com/source/loveit.com

Learning from Pinterest's errors, Loveit comes right out of the gate with an opt-out code.

As was predicted; now, every Pinterest clone is going to have a proprietary blocking code, forcing everyone to recode their websites, and creating a culture of "free-to-steal" as the default state. And look at the pulling of heartstrings: this blocking code is called "nolove." <meta name="LoveIt" content="nolove">. Right. Thanks, but no thanks. No one should have to do this for what is bound to become hundreds of websites.

The recoding-for-every-new-copyright-infringement-platform insanity does not stop here. You can block individual images with yet another propriety attribute to insert in the img src code: nolove="nolove" - again, aw shucks, don't you want love? No? You want no love? No love for this poor unloved image.

There is a way out of this madness with your .htaccess file. Image substitution is more complicated than with Pinterest, because Loveit.com sneakily fails to identify itself in the user-agent field. Instead, you have to deny access to all of Amazon's cloud server IP ranges. There is no downside to this, there is no legitimate traffic to be received from an Amazon cloud server.

Add the following at the top of your .htacess file:

ErrorDocument 403 http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8445/7895057430_928a6c1171_b.jpg

Add this last in your .htaccess file:

Allow from all
order allow,deny
allow from all

Deny from 8.18.144.0/23
Deny from 23.20.0.0/14
Deny from 46.51.128.0/17
Deny from 46.137.0.0/16
Deny from 50.16.0.0/14
Deny from 50.112.0.0/16
Deny from 54.240.0.0/12
Deny from 67.202.0.0/18
Deny from 72.44.32.0/19
Deny from 75.101.128.0/17
Deny from 79.125.0.0/17
Deny from 96.127.0.0/17
Deny from 103.4.8.0/21
Deny from 107.20.0.0/14
Deny from 122.248.192.0/18
Deny from 174.129.0.0/16
Deny from 175.41.128.0/17
Deny from 176.32.64.0/18
Deny from 176.34.0.0/16
Deny from 177.71.128.0/17
Deny from 184.72.0.0/15
Deny from 184.169.128.0/17
Deny from 204.236.128.0/17
Deny from 216.182.224.0/20

This will substitute any unwanted love for this image:

FUN for you, HELL for me

Pinranker: Your Spamming Gateway

Automated copyright infringement for profit

Pinranker is a software that allows you to spam the pinning daylights out of Pinterest. Simply highlight a radio button to grab random images from Google, Yahoo, Flickr and even Youtube videos based on the search query of your choice, and Pinranker will automate pins, repins, and embed your Amazon affiliate code (not sure why, since Pinterest is stripping them off).

Copyright infringement is now automated via spambots, thanks to Pinterest. Oh, what a beautiful thing you've "created," Ben Silbermann.

Pinterest Can Afford Higher Rent

According to Business Insider, Pinterest has moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco, 808 Brannan Street.

Their swanky new digs are at the "Fashion Center" - a 2-story building from the 30's with big windows.


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More Music Lessons

In Music Lessons, we made some parallels between the piracy-induced decline of the music industry with Pinterest, and predicted a similar decline in the availability and quality of image content on the internet. The article in refence, David Lowery's Letter to Emily White has gone "viral" and the phenomenon has given rise to numerous rebuttals along with the praise.

The comments to the rather toothless rebuttal article A WSJ Intern Replies To An NPR Intern’s Viral Post on Music Piracy are more revealing than the article itself. While one commenter bemoans, statistics in hand that

"[...] recorded music has gone from a $12B business in 2001 to a $6B business in 2011. About 35% of that 19% is 7900 Petabytes which was 11 billion movies consumed that people didn’t pay for. That is why Home Video has gone from a $26B business to an $18B business. Pirate Bay is the 81st most popular web site, more popular than Netflix and way more popular than Spotify. ISPs made $50B in 2011 selling a service that comes with free music, free movies, free software, free games and free books. the solution is for ISPs to obey the law and terminate repeat infringers."

another commenter adds, taking a completely different angle:

It’s not because we’re poor, we’re just living in a high speed world where we want access to EVERYTHING… EVERYWHERE and it’s services like iTunes, Spotify and Pirate Bay (listed in descending order of benefit to musicians) that are providing us with that.[...]This will cause a total lull in musical creativity, inspiration, originality and general interest in music until the industry devolves into being a totally non profitable market for anyone because no one will care to consume it anymore. It’s bleak, man.

Interestingly, a more robust rebuttal of David Lowery's piece on Boing Boing has elicited some angry backlash... against the rebuttal itself:

"The issue, for me, isn't whether millions of hobbyists can squeeze out $100 a year while technology companies skim millions from the transactions, but whether a professional class of musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, etc. can still exist in this country."

"Morrison posted an opinion that "we shared music when it was casettes". And then didn't bother to inquire whether the amount of sharing in any way equated to digital sharing."

From the camp of "Love The Art, Hate The Artist":

"Do you know any musicians who make music only for money? I don't. They make music because they can't stop themselves from making music. And they have day jobs."

"Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock."

"If you want to sing, sing. But, for God's sake, stop complaining about how you're being oppressed because the rest of us don't want to support you while you do it."

"It's been coming for awhile. Musicians have officially become boring."

"The free content crowd doesn't value artists. And they're nasty about it too. Nicely done."

Until Pinterest came along, graphical content was largely untouched by piracy. Ben Silbermann has found a way to tap into this poor cousin of "sharable content" with a platform geared towards the hoarding of third-party digital images by its users, adding a further leaching of creator's copyright with an embed feature that is little more than a gateway to a hotlinking free-for-all of this infringed content.

What is the adaptive path for visual artist with respect to their partnership with the internet?

REDUCE CONTENT. Reduce definition. Reduce size. Reduce availability. Institute a pay-per-view. Charge for website access. Educate the masses.

We may be fighting Pinterest now; tomorrow, we'll be fighting hundreds of Pinterest clones.

Pressuring Pinterest & Pinners

Everyone who has raised a child knows how difficult it is to be heard by those little ones when they have decided that they just don't want to hear.

How can artists get pinners' attention? Words will fall on deaf ears, therefore, all we have left are actions. They do, after all, speak louder than words.

Public relations:
(1) Google "pinterest copyright infringement" - click on "more search tools" on the left menu and select "last 24 hours" or "last week" and make sure that the anti-Pinterest voice is one of the first in the comment sections of articles about Pinterest. Enlighten the audience on what pinners seem to understand the least: how Pinterest "publicity" doesn't help every artist's business model, that it doesn't help yours, and that it's not their right to make the assumption that artists seek fame above all, and saddle us with endless DMCAs take downs.

(2) Log in to your Pinterest account, and repin copyright warning images from Pin Hammer's pin boards

If you have your own website:
As instructed in this post Educate Pinners With .htaccess, hijack pin requests to substitute an image containing a stern copyright warning.

If copyright has occurred, you have some options:
(1) Be vigilant with your content and serve as many DMCA notices as necessary, emailing copyright@pinterest.com, not the automated form on Pinterest's website. The blank frames where images use to be will linger and serve as a reminder that infringement has occurred and that there are artists that do not welcome it.

(2) Log in to your Pinterest account and post some version of the below in the infringing pin's comment section:

You have posted my image without permission. By taking away my lawful right to distribute this image and handing this right to Pinterest, you are making it more difficult for me to earn money from my work. You are helping Pinterest make money from my work instead of me. Please help artists continue to be able to derive an income from self-publishing on the internet by not pining their work. I'd rather you remove the image, but if you really want to keep it on Pinterest, my licensing rate for every posting/re-pinning on a Pinterest pinboard is $250.00/yr. Again, I would prefer if you remove the image because Pinterest has no hotlink protection.

To quote a commenter on Pinterest announces new terms of service & that private boards are coming soon:

Despite first necessary changes to protect the Pinterest founder from major lawsuits the conflict with copyright persists. The majority of pinboard owners still do not and will not care about copyright. Also Pinterest can trust that the majority of copyright owners will not take the effort to constantly check illegal pins. From my point of view Pinterest tries to get away with a “dirty deal” between them and their users (silent agreement to tolerate uncounted copyright infringement)as cheap as possible. Only if and when copyright owners (can) protest they will finally do something. I do not think that this is a basis for an ethical business conduct.

WE NEED TO KEEP THE PROTEST ALIVE. EVERY DAY.

Good News and Bad News.

A mere 3 lines of code on your website will send a clear message.

The method described in Educate Pinners with .htaccess gives results like the one your see illustrated above in the screenshot. Pinners pin the image of their choice, but only if they look back at their pinboard will they notice the copyright-warning image that has been automatically substituted. If they notice the message, typically, they will erase it themselves - saving YOU the trouble of DMCA notices, and controlling the message that pinners receive when they infringe on your copyright.

All of this magic is accomplished with just 3 lines of code in your website's .htaccess file.

That was the good news. Now, for the bad news.

A surprisingly large contingent of pinners is so stubbornly imbued with its self-given right to grab an artist's content in order to gain some measure of approval from total strangers on the internet ("followers") that after Pinterest itself has blocked them from pinning content from one's domain and receiving a pop up message that pinning isn't allowed, they press on and pin anyway, in which case they end up pinning a substituted copyright-warning image instead of the image they wished to pin.

Now, you'd think that after receiving two manners of copyright warnings, the pinner would pause, and infringe copyrights on another hapless website that isn't yours. If you were to think this, you'd be very wrong.

For after these two copyright warnings, a shocking number of pinners simply double-back with their browser back-button to the image search engine result page where they originally saw your image, and pin from there.

Because you put it on the internet, and no matter how many times they're warned not to take it, they're going to bloody grab that image to impress strangers, and enrich Ben Silbermann.

It's going to be very, very difficult to change things. Pinterest will have to yield. But the copyright-infringement platform is just that, and doesn't show signs of wanting to go legit.

Convincing Pinners Might Be An Uphill Battle

Pinterest is a pain to many creators.
Pinterest doesn't "get it." Will the public?

Meet The Real Linda Ellis is a disturbing read where a self-described innocent infringer berates a copyright holder for attempting to enforce statutory damages to the tune of $7500.00.

Linda Ellis wrote a rather simplistic poem entitled "The Dash" that some years ago has made the FWD: FWD: FWD: email rounds that grannies love to send each other. The poem is about the dash between the birth and death years on a tombstone, metaphorically speaking, the "living" between the two dates. Linda Ellis claims to have registered this work, and it has become her bread an butter, going as far as expanding the little ditty into a book about not wasting time.

When the poem was found, posted in its entirety, on April Brown's website, Linda Ellis sent her a demand for $7500 for the use of her poem.

What resulted is a very long exchange that, regardless of the merits of the poem, demonstrates the entrenched disregard and the deep lack of understanding of copyright law found in some segments of the general public.

While it's easy to sympathize with Brown's shock, anger and frustration at having to pay an amount many, many times greater than the value of her use of the poem, her misadventure illustrates the pitfalls of using a copyright-infringement platform like Pinterest.

Like a minefield, most of the steps you will take won't blow your leg off, but eventually, you, or someone in your village will be the unlucky one to pay the price.

If the Brown/Ellis conflict is any indication, creators attempting to defend their copyright against pinners (because Pinterest itself rejects all blame in their ToS) will be labelled copyright trolls, and the infringers, innocent infringers.

Ben Silbermann may wax poetic about making Pinterest "beautiful" but Pinterest is a hideous reality to the many creators whose contents its users grab, for it to commercially exploit some time in the near future, as the hiring of Tim Kendall suggests. If creators don't defend their copyright, they lose; if they defend it, they lose, too - legal fees and public opinion.

Thanks, Ben.

Pinterest Bracing Self Against Lawsuit(s)?

Several weeks after hiring Tim Kendall, Facebook's monetization man, Pinterest has enlisted no less than former Google Deputy General Counsel Michael Yang as its first General Counsel.

To speculate, it is possible that Pinterest will take advice and actually become respectful of copyrights and take serious steps to educate their users. It is also possible that Pinterest intends to unleash punishing legal challenges should any creator(s) dare to take them on.

If creators are hoping to continue making a living off their images and protecting their copyrights against the actions of Pinterest's users and those of present and future Pinterest-clone users, they must make their voices heard - they will have to scream at the top of their web-lungs. Begging "pinners" to try to understand their plight or educating "pinners" (something Pinterest seems loathe to do) on how pinning may hurt creators' livelihoods.

There are some that think creators have already lost the battle, and ought to give up their copyrights and associated livelihoods lest they become the "bad guys."

I’m wondering if everyone has come to the same conclusion: no company is ever going to bring a copyright infringement suit against a Pinterest user. [...] Sending a Pinterest user a letter instructing them to remove your copyrighted materials and accusing them of copyright infringement is [...] a total slap in the face.
-Catlan McCurdy

While Ms. Mc Curdy sides with the popular internet behemoth, the small artists continue to hurt: Ellen Ward, who publishes wonderfully spontaneous drawings, is another David against the Pinterest-Goliath.

Do we have a slingshot?

Ben Silbermann's New Account

When the copyright infringement monster made its presence felt under the beds of pinners everywhere, Ben Silbermann himself deleted his own boards at http://pinterest.com/ben/, a URL that now leads to a 404-not-found page. He did, however, start a new one from scratch, under the rather disingenuous guise of wanting the experience what it is like to be a debuting pinner all over again. Right.



CLICK HERE to view Silbermann's new (possibly) copyright-respecting boards. Limiting, isn't it, Ben?

What Pinners Are Handing Over to Ben Silbermann

Pinners are giving Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann
the gift of free content, exploitable for his profit.

When an artist wishes to create something with some hope of deriving revenues from his work, a lot of time, effort and creativity are called upon. All Ben Silbermann needs to obtain that same content is for a pinner to make one little click for him.

ONE Craft Photograph
Crafter vs.	Pinner
Spending days designing cute crocheted slippers Making several slippers, improving design and yarn selection each time Writing out instructions Hassling friends for a baby to put slippers on for photograph working to get that perfect lighting and baby foot position	One click

ONE Painting
Painter vs.	Pinner
Spending years perfecting a concept and a style Getting a really good idea Buying materials, making the art Taking a good photo without glare and even lighting	One click

ONE Photograph
Photographer vs.	Pinner
Finding that perfect location Airline ticket to perfect location Hiring model Hiring make up artist Hotels for everyone Waiting 4 days for the right clouds Digital post-processing	One click

This is the work that pinners are handing over to Pinterest. Who should profit from the work of an artist? The artist him/herself, or Pinterest's Ben Silbermann?

Pintere$$$$s$$$t

Pinterest valued at 1 billion


If Pinterest really is worth 1 billion,
no one can dispute that it is a worthwhile target for a lawsuit.

According to a source on TheNExtWeb (TNW), "this most recent round of funding is said to include Bessemer, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark," and Rakuten. They have raised between 100 to 120 million fresh millions of dollar in funding, depending on the source.

Rakuten, a giant Japanese e-commerce company that already owns Kobo, Play.com and Buy.com is a lead investor."When asked about potential copyright infringement issues, Rakuten responded saying that Pinterest will ultimately overcome such problems. "

We hope they are wrong about this.

One billion may actually be an underestimate for the worth of all the content that Pinterest users have scraped from unwilling or unknowing third parties.