Facebook's Planned WANT Button Meets Legal Challenge

According to Francine Ward, Attorney, reports:

On October 12th a Michigan based company called CVG-SAB LLC filed suit against Facebook, Inc. for alleged trademark infringement. The company bringing suit is better known by its DBA name, WANT. In short, it connects people with products they like, desire, or already have.

[...]Facebook has not commented on the suit, nor has a trial date been set.

Mmmm. That might just explain why Facebook so suddenly withdrew its new its Pinterest-like feature in the testing phase, before they were rolled out to the general public.

Facebook Backs Off on Want It Button

The article: Unpinned: Facebook Shuts Down Test Of Its Pinterest-Style Collections Feature reports that the experimental "Pinterest-like" Facebook gadgets have already vanished from Facebook.

That's too bad, because Facebook's plan was one that shunned copyright infringement, partnering instead with some companies that gave permission before their images were used in the user's "Collections."

The experiment was a flop.

This is interesting because many commercial outlets are trying to get their foot in Pinterest's door and some may be succeeding to some degree, like the Martha Stewart Living Pinterest page. It truly drives the point home that people love to infringe on copyright of artists to fill their image hoards much more than they do commercial images with implied permission.

This reinforces the notion that Pinterest owes its success to the unabashed copyright infringement that it facilitates, and that it probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere without it.

Not Cool, The Cool Hunter

The shutting down of The Cool Hunter's Facebook Fan Page has set bloggers' typewriters on fire. The Cool Hunter's is a website whose sphere activity is very similar to Pinterest, minus the social aspect.


You can still find The Cool Hunter's web page
but you won't find its Facebook Fan Page anymore.

The Cool Hunter puts third-party images together in a lattice, and calls them cool. Their attitude is that if you find your content on The Cool Hunter, and want it removed, they will remove it - just like Pinterest and its 10 million strong no-copyright-infringement-intended army. Both claim the right to infringe to their heart's content, and send content creators on endless goose chases for their images.

Unlike Pinterest, who earns its keep through raising of venture capital, The Cool Hunter monetizes the infringed content in a more conspicuous manner by placing advertisements around it.

The Cool Hunter marketed itself, in part, through a Facebook fan page. This fan page was recently shut down amidst the consternation of its 788,000 members, for cause of REPEATED COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. We're talking sending-a-message to a lot of people, here.

I'll give the author of APhotoEditor's blog the last word. In Facebook Shuts Down Business Fan Page For Repeated Copyright Infringement, the blogger comments:

It makes me wonder if Facebook is showing Pinterest that the proper way to curate is to upload something you own the rights to then enable the sharing.

Damn straight - Facebook is showing Pinterest how it's done.

I Want It: Facebook Plans To Steal Pinterest Thunder

Facebook is testing a new new feature called Collections where users mark images and create wishlists of products. Partners thus far include Pottery Barn, Neiman Marcus, Fab.com and Victoria's Secret. The collection look like photo albums.

Currently being tested are "want" and "collect" buttons.

It sounds a lot like Pinterest, if Pinterest had chosen a path more clearly within the law. Facebook's system appears to be opted in by retailers, rather than opted out; Facebook limits users to photos of products selected by retailers. Beyond that, there is surprisingly little to say. The very fact that the default state is OPT IN renders the whole operation kosher, as far as infringement is concerned.

Pinterest Deflates Again

...all of that hype never seems to fully drown out the hum of online merchants telling us that, despite the hours and hours of time they spend on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest [...] marketing their sales, the returns are negligible.

When content providers decide to compromise their copyright by allowing their content on Pinterest, or even posting it themselves, they do so with the expectation of some measure of promotion of their product or website, or better yet, sales.

Pooling data from 5 anomymous online marketplaces, David Steiner, writing for EcommerceBytes reveals dismal referral traffic from Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

The much-hyped "Pinterest high conversion rate" suffers a devastating blow:

Twitter had only a quarter of Pinterest's traffic, the quality and conversion rate was about double that of Pinterest

CornerstoneConsultingInc reports that:

...according to Bloomberg, the data found that Pinterest facilitates buying, but only to a relatively unimpressive extent. An average Pinterest purchase came out to $.75 as contrasted against $2.08 per order from Facebook referrals and $33.66 from Twitter.

In view of these statistics, coupled with the standard NOFOLLOW attribute link scheme of most of the crowdsourced scrapers, there is very little to gain by allowing Pinterest to re-distribute your content, and possibly more to lose in the long run as you lose sight of where your intellectual property ends up.