Exploding Heads

In her blog post Copyright Laws and Why My Head May Explode, "jediane9," after reading about Roni Loren's financial settlement with an unnamed photographer for displaying his photo on her blog without permission, bemoans "copyright trolls."

Larger companies actually hire people called “infringement trolls” to scope the web looking for photos used without permission. And really, all those infringement trolls have to do is go to Pinterest, because that site is about 99% copyright infringement.

It's always the same arguments. Victims of copyright infringement are vilified; they're supposed to be nice, and write a polite note asking for the infringing material to be removed. Infringers don't understand that the majority of photographers/artists will, in fact, rarely experience the need to go beyond a polite request or a DMCA take-down directly to the web host. Once the search for copyright infringements and serving of take-down notices becomes an onerous, repetitive and time-consuming task taking too much away from their creative efforts, they will start thinking of using the citizen speed trap that copyright laws allow them to use. That is, ask for cash compensation.

But if you post a photo of something you like, even go so far as to credit and link to the original source, how is that a bad thing? You’re not gaining anything from it, and I don’t think (re: I’m totally not sure) the artist is losing anything from it. If anything you’re helping promote their art, right?

Here we go. The "it's non-commercial use!" - "artists aren't losing!" - "but I gave proper credit!" and "it's great promotion!" mashed together in one paragraph. This exemplifies what people just don't get. It embodies the four tenets of copyright-ignorance that Pinterest is exploiting. It may be done routinely, but it's never morally right to exploit ignorance, especially not to the extent that Pinterest does.

But in all honestly, bloggers and reviewers like me only have good intentions when we post something that “belongs” to someone else.

Thoese "good intentions" come directly from the deep well of ignorance about how artists monetize their work. The road to a lawsuit and a cash settlement is paved with such good intentions.

Awareness, Action!

If you have a Pinterest account, and have a few minutes, do REPIN from http://pinterest.com/pinhammer - maximize the number of pinners that get to see these graphic copyright messages in the general feed.

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.

Music Lessons

The music industry was brought to its knees by copyright infringement. They have been dealing with willful ignorance of copyright laws, and the impoverishment of many musicians for years; we all know the battle is quite lost.

Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered, by David Lowery, is a long article, but it is an important read for all artists.

Recorded music revenue is down 64% since 1999.

Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!

The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.

[...] “small” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”.

[...]Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. [...] [Copyright] has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally.

What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting.

From the comments:

The message is: “Content creators, get in line to give your work away for the pleasure of possibly earning a bit of anonymous attention somewhere out over the inter-waves.”

The article is brimming with gems. A convincing point is made that people don't mind paying corporations for copyright-infringement platforms, hardware, and infrastructure, but they'd rather not pay the artists. Artists enforcing their copyrights are "copyright trolls" and "extortionists."

Please share this link:

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Post it on Facebook, forums, add comments about Pinterest to the article's discussion, raise awareness. Everyone should read it - the article, and the abundant comments below it.


The music industry is already on its knees.
We're next.

Nordstrom, That's The Right Idea!

Perfectly legitimate, and cool for everyone.

Nordstrom's has a Pinterest page! And why not. They're pinning pictures from a catalog for whom they own the rights, they are "authentic" to what they are selling, and they're displaying attractive, attainable, easy-to-find merchandise that can be repinned without losing sleep over potential copyright infringement lawsuits. You can pin a whole fantasy wardrobe, buy it, and enjoy wearing it.

That's a way better model than the current orgy of copyright infringement. Does Nordstrom's commercial presence diminish Pinterest? One might argue that it does not, since the page has, at the time the screenshot was taken, a healthy ~19,000 followers. People like it!

Hacktivism vs. Consumerism

Let's be realistic
"Dumps" not likely to go viral on the Pinterest crowd

Hacktivism is the exploitation of the internet, through means that weren't necessarily intended, for the purpose of spreading a social message.

New Forms of Hacktivism suggests pinning pictures of Occupy protests, infographics about climate change, quotes from Malcolm X or Naomi Wolf, garbage dumps or even Walmart. "The first time I posted an image of two women kissing, I got a complaining comment from a woman who said her granddaughter used the site and she didn’t want her exposed to things like that. Expose!"

Some Definitions

NEW WORDS:

Pinnosphere: The collective of all the user-uploaded images on the internet, largely without consent of the creators/authors/photographers, for the purposes of image consumption on pinsites.

Pinsite: A website where users are encouraged to scrape third-party content for display and viewing on said website.

Image Consumption: The act of viewing an image as an end in itself, for inspiration, collection, or simple enjoyment.

How Can The Pinnosphere Hurt Artists?

The pinnosphere is the aggregate of all the images that have been uploaded by users on copyright-infringement platforms such as Pinterest.

Potential website visitors have a finite amount of time available for exploring the internet; viewership is therefore a finite resource that webmasters compete for. They compete for this commodity (visitor traffic) in order to display advertisement, or make sales of products. The larger the size of the web, the smaller the amount of time spent per website, on average.

Copyright-infringement platforms increase the size of the web by multiplying the number of pages where content can be viewed, even if this content is often repeated (multiple original pins from source, pins from search engine result pages, repins, repins of repins). In the aggregate, this swelling of content reduces the amount of time people spend on the source websites.

When website visitors spend more of their finite internet viewing time on Pinterest, they spend less time on the source websites as well.

Further, the source websites have to compete with their own infringed images in the pinnosphere (some creators may have more images in the pinnosphere than on their own websites) - with the added attraction of everyone else's best work, and the users getting their egos flattered with comments and followers for their great "picks" while the originators themselves lose both traffic and feedback.

There are reports of Pinterest links driving very little traffic to the source websites.

In her blog post, No Interest in Pinterest, Annie Paxye writes: "I’ve been told by people that I should be flattered that my images are ‘pinned’ or that I should be grateful that it brings traffic to my blog. But after seeing the flow and traffic over time, it just feels like stealing and the traffic seems to have no value. I’m not connecting with more people through this traffic and I’m not hearing why someone likes my posts or images."

Similarly, Bailey of the Mustard Ampersand Blog writes: "While I do get marginal traffic from Pinterest (and by marginal I mean less than 50 total referrals over a month, far fewer than my other networks), it’s not proportionate to the amount of views, repins, likes, etc., that I get on Pinterest. I don’t expect every user to click through. But Etsy has a strong stats program in place, and I can see exactly how many of my referrals are from Pinterest – and it’s not many. Compared to how many referrals I get from Facebook and Tumblr, it’s shockingly low."

Copyright-infringement platform users often have very limited understanding of the workings of the internet and operate under the delusion that the only way images can be monetized is with the old-fashioned photography business model of licensing for printed applications or other commercial broadcast. They may believe that because they wouldn't "buy" licensing to the images they upload on the servers of copyright-infringement platforms no matter what, they are not hurting the originators of the work. They are not cognizant that on the internet, images are often worth much more than the object they represent, and that the image itself has become the commodity that is consumed - a commodity that is often monetized with advertising.