Pinterest Is The Most Despicable Website On The Internet

Remember how you used to be able to check for copyright infringement with this URL?

http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com

Not anymore. Now you have to join Pinterest and log into it. If you don't, you get this prompt:


That's right; Pinterest won't even let you check for copyright infringement on your own website without you SIGNING UP and AGREEING TO THEIR TERMS OF SERVICE. Isn't that outrageous? Their gall is just obscene. Once you're logged in, and filing your DMCA take-down notice, these unscrupulous fiends know who you are and have proof that you agreed to their TOS. Talk about covering their filthy keisters against the arm of justice.

All these people out there, thinking they're collecting pretty pictures, they have no idea what a disgusting organization their "hobby" is enriching, at whose expense, and the pain they are inflicting on artists.

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If that's not annoying enough, the DMCA form has been plagued with bugs for months that Pinterest sure is in no hurry to fix, trying to make it as difficult as possible for the victims of their relentless crowdscraping.

We have to deal with:

• Explanations for "strike" and "remove all" that pop up all over the area where you are trying to click on the radio buttons.
• These pop up explanations cover up the fact that the radio buttons for the first pin and those for the second pin TOGGLE AGAINST EACH OTHER in a way that sabotages ALL multiple-complaint submissions, and result in a rejection with the message "this field is required" and a blanking out of many the field below that need to be re-entered (country, tick-boxes, signature). They are forcing you to do everything TWICE. For months.
• These bugs have been there so long that Pinterest MUST be doing this on purpose to harass copyright holders, or it's their absolute lowest priority. They want us to give up.

Every artist's Pinterest nightmare

Worthwhile Reads

The Pinterest (Er, Tumblr) Problem, Fair Use, and a Suggestion for Change from Joe Ross.

But the problem [...] is that the “Pinterest problem” is absolutely not on a scale never before seen. This is, in fact, how the internet works. The compliance with the DMCA and solid indemnification clauses keep companies out of hot copyright water, but users are infringing at an astounding daily rate.

Pinterest and Copyright Infringements from the Beckwith Mansion & Estate Blog.

[...] when people ask, “Are you on Pinterest?” I tell them I am not and that I don’t believe in supporting copyright infringements.

As Predicted...

As predicted in Exploiting Pinterest's Embed Feature, semi-automated or fully automated scraper sites are re-arranging Pinterest's crowdscraped content for further redistribution but especially PROFIT.

May this serve as a reminder for those that are flattered when their material is "pinned" - when the horses run out of the barn, there is no telling how far they'll go.

To wit: craftprojectimage.com.

Every content creator's favorite byline is displayed on this scraper blog:

No copyright infringement intended. The source of each image and it's related text is always linked to with the 'source' link at the bottom of each post.

Except that the "source link" leads back to Pinterest, not to the content provider's own website.

And the below, a reminder for everyone that argues that "Pinterest makes no money!!!":

This website uses third-party advertising companies to serve ads to visitors of this site and may use information (not including visitors' name, addresses, e-mail addresses, or telephone numbers) about visits to this website to provide ads which are of interest to the visitors. It is advised to install a dependable anti-virus software and firewall on visitor's computer so as to have optimum safety from computer virus attacks.

Pinterest may make no money beyond raising venture capital by exploiting other people's content by way of crowdscraping, but there is nothing to stop fourth-party scraper sites to exploit the EMBED feature and actually profit from copyright infringement.

The "flattery" of having one's artistic material ravaged by pinners comes at the cost of being used a tool by internet pirate to draw visitors, and infect their computers.

Pinterest Sputters

Pin hags are getting bored of red velvet shit.
After a meteoric rise, and subsequent leveling off of traffic, Pinterest's 2013 second quarter appears to demonstrate that stealing images from artists, photographers and bloggers gets old after a while. One can always hope that Pinterest will myspace itself.

Let's take a closer look at the last 3 months:


Pinterest is trending down, artists hopeful
While it's reasonable to expect traffic downturns during the summer months while pin hags are out gardening, this downturn does appear more pronounced and sustained than it was at the corresponding time last year.

What factors might contribute to this excellent downturn?

• It takes a few months for pin hags to realize how futile their picture collections are.
• Bing, Yahoo and Google Image searches now show full-size images without having to visit source websites, competing with Pinterest's highly successful business model of shamelessly grabbing other people's pictorial content by way of crowdscraping.
• Even spammers are beginning to realize that Pinterest referral traffic is just a worthless trickle.
• All the pictures have already been pinned, so Pinterest is degenerating into an incestuous orgy of monotonous re-pinning.
• Maybe the "strikes" are working a slow grind?

Pinterest is not going down without a fight.

• The image displays are even bigger!
• Analytic features for overtly commercial boards, so that their owners get to see in charts and numbers how completely useless Pinterest referral traffic really is!
• Hassling the content providers: DMCA take-down requests are more error-prone than ever with the "strike system" radio buttons popup text interfering with the use of the buttons, glitches like the button that is clicked causing the button in the following entry field to unclick, error messages that wipe out the check-marks and pull-down selection menus, DMCA confirmation letters that do not list the images that have been taken down (if they have been taken down).

If Pinterest flouders, how about crowdscraping the written word, next?

Copyright Infringement Becomes Too Burdensome

In Cindy Schnackel's RedBubble blog entry Big Changes, the artist explains how rampant copyright infringement is affecting the way she publishes her work on the internet:

One of the biggest changes[...] is to cease selling many, (or any), reprints on Red Bubble.

[...]Changes to search engines give away images instead of drive traffic to us now. Social and sharing sites have become infringement cesspools. Scraper sites link our work to porn and ads and hide behind secretive web hosts.

How has Pinterest and search engines displaying full-size images instead of just thumbnails affected the way you publish your work on the internet?

Article Worth Pointing Out

The Examiner.com's Eric George, in Long, Hot and Expensive Summer writes:

The firing of a newspaper blogger for informing the general public that Pinterest is not copyright infringement. Well, the paper was about to get sued into oblivion because some people on Pinterest used that as a defense in their cases and LOST.

The bottom line is it is going to be a very long and very hot and very expensive summer for infringers and the providers who have dumped everything on the users. It may not happen this year if things are appealed but the ship is sinking and the rats are running to get off and move the infringing materials to other companies they buy overseas. I hope the new system coming in allows them to be sued even if they do that.

Regrettably, no sources are given or names mentioned. I can't ascribe a comfortable level of credibility to the article but I thought I'd share anyway!

Outrage of the month

In Pinterest photos: Can they be used without copyright infringement?, author "bevcohen" writes:

What I find very confusing is why Pinterest users are allowed to pin pictures from all over the internet without regard for their rights to use those pictures. Public domain or not, pictures are continually being pinned.

And pictures on Pinterest can be re-pinned. If that’s the case, it seems reasonable that we should be able to use those pictures on posts at Bubblews or anywhere else.

So instead of searching the internet for public domain pictures that we can use without copyright infringement, Pinterest might be a great one-stop photo shopping site. Any thoughts?

Any thought? Yes, disturbing thoughts. As most of us creatives have feared when becoming aware of the existence of Pinterest, the public's perception of an image posted on Pinterest is that this image is fair game for them to use on whatever website they feel like.

Legal Issue Settled?

In a blog post by Mydesert.com, Maureen Gilmer re-assures her readers that "pinning pictures is not copyright infringement." Now we know?

No, pinning pictures is not copyright infringement, but the jury is still out about whether or not it’s a threat to artists and photographers. Many are using watermarks on their pictures to emphasize it’s copyrighted within the Pinterest system.

Ironically, the author's images on the blog have buttons labelled "PURCHASE IMAGE" with a shopping cart icon. I am not kidding. You can't make this stuff up. I repeat: she is trying to sell rights to the images she posted on the blog! Not only that, but she claims with obvious pride that the images are pinned all over Pinterest already!

Who will purchase her images, when, as indicated in the images' caption, they are pinned all over Pinterest? I can just hotlink them from Pinterest with the EMBED code, then Maureen can sue to original pinner, and not me. Besides, it's not copyright infringement, right?

How can she say that "the jury is still out about whether or not it’s a threat to artists and photographers" when she should have the perfect vantage point to know that it is a threat to her selling rights to her photos?

I hate to be mean, but that was one of the most ignorant things I've ever read.

Absolute MUST-READ

Photographer Tara Bradford relates a story, in This photo is not free: Nikken EU & copyright infringement, where a company infringed on her copyright for commercial and promotional endeavors, and incredibly, is refusing to pay her a very reasonable, non-punitive fee of $535.00 for the photo, because, their spokesperson claims, THEY TOOK THE PICTURE FROM PINTEREST and Tara should suck it up. The company is even refusing to apologize.

This is absolutely outrageous.

According to Tara,

[The spokesperson's] argument blamed the so-called "original pinner," insisting that if other people grabbed the photo, Nikken EU could too. She claimed to be "unaware of any copyright restrictions related to the use of this photo..." Further, she advised that Nikken EU "strongly deny any copyright infringement and recommend that you contact the person who first posted the photo and availed it to all Pinterest users."

Photographer Against Pinterest

In About Pinterest: An open letter to my readers, photographer Tara Bradford writes:

[...] I don't want even one of my photos on Pinterest.[...]

I am trying to prevent my original work from losing its value by being pinned (and uncredited) numerous times on multiple Pinterest boards, amidst groupings of dubious quality and origin. Pinterest is a big company with massive funding and I am one small business owner, simply trying to protect my livelihood. I receive no benefit whatsoever from my photography appearing on Pinterest.

For other posts from Tara about Pinterest, read:

Picture This, Pinterest

Has It Come To This?

The continuing saga of keeping photos off Pinterest - this article mentions a pinner that knowingly posts Tara's photographs knowing full well this is against her will.

Still No Self-Promotion

Pinterest's early TOS and user etiquette had some firm language warning against "self-promotion" - setting the tone of the "pinned" images never to belong to the pinners. If a pinner can only "promote" other people's images, by definition they do own the copyright to them.

Pinterest has a new feature where they "verify" your website, which on the surface sounds like it could be a way to legitimize and set paramaters for self-promotion and posting one's own images.

Accounts with a verified website have confirmed ownership of their website using our automatic verification process. Website verification establishes the link between a website and a Pinterest account.

These accounts are marked with a checkmark which displays next to their website on their profile page and below their name in search results.

However, this seem not to be the case at all: In Do NOT to verify your website in Pinterest - Read my story. the below was reported:

This was a big mistake: very short time after I verified my website in Pinterest, my account got deactivated. There was no warning from Pinterest and no specific reason.

They've just suddenly decided that I was a spammer. I believe that they've noticed that most of my pins are linked to my website and they didn't like it so they kicked me out.

But here is the big issue: Because of the association between my website and my account - my website got banned from Pinterest as well.

Pinterest News Roundup

A lively discussion on the Etsy forum, spanning at least 25 pages in two days, was spurred by the following opening post by an Etsy seller, after receiving a "strike":

What the heck??? I pinned an image from a blog I follow. It was not the person's website. How on earth would I have known that the person didn't want their stuff pinned? This really stinks.... I don't care about the pin, I care about getting cyber-slapped for something that Pinterest encourages - PINNING!!!

Further down in the thread, she write:

If she didn't want me to pin the image at all, why didn't she just send me a message thru Pinterest right then and there and tell me to delete the pin???

...which is a fairly typical demand for courtesy from copyright infringers that lack the courtesy of asking for permission, and do not realize how much time they are costing content creators in chasing their content.

It is interesting to note that many pinners in that thread report having had "strikes" and some pins deleted. Etsy pinners are by no means a random sample, but if so many pinners have pins removed, one might be led to believe that Pinterest handles MASSIVE amounts of DMCA take-downs.

Photog Gets Into Nasty Tussle With Radio Station Over Copyright Infringement outlines a case where a photograph was used without permission, and is followed by some fascinating comments.

In Why can't we use Google images on our website?, a webmaster requests the help of a consumer advocate after receiving a demand from Getty Images. The comment section is very lively here, too.

While not about images, AP wins big: Why a court said clipping content is not fair use reports on a recent judgement imposing fair use limits on the written word, in this case, snippets from news articles.

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.

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.

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.



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.

Pinterest's Ridiculously Ineffective Warnings.

At last, I found a reaction from someone receiving a copyright notice from Pinterest. Heidi Lyn Burke 's Burke can be summarized as "I'm curious whose picture it is, I can't figure it out, moving on!"

If they hadn't told me about it I wouldn't have even noticed . . . still, I wonder what exactly it was.

Another blogger, Duck Duck Cow dwells in irony, featuring a heavy copyright notice protecting her own blog:

Copyright Notice Copyright 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007. Every paragraph, sentence and split modifier on this blog is the sole property of the Cow, as the author, unless other credit is given. Any use or reproduction of this stuff without written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

The blog features 4 images uploaded from Pinterest that credit the "pin" and link to it, rather than crediting the author directly, and linking to the original content.

That's for irony.

More reading: Copyright, terms of use and Pinterest by by Judy G. Russell

For references, below is a "strike" letter dated Feb 20:

“This is to let you know that we removed one (or more) of your Pins as a result of a copyright complaint. The complaint was not directed against you or your Pin. It was reported by ####### and directed against another user who Pinned or re-Pinned the same content from the following address: #########

While many copyright owners are happy to have their content Pinned on Pinterest, we recognize that some do not want their content to appear on Pinterest. Where, as here, a copyright owner notifies us that they want their content removed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), it is our policy to remove the allegedly infringing Pin, as well as all other Pins that contain the same content if the copyright owners so choses.

Again, this complaint was not directed at you, or anything you did. We just thought you’d like to know why we removed your Pin.

Happy Pinning and thanks again for using Pinterest.

The Pinterest Team
Pinterest DMCA #ID 0000000″

Pinterest Gets Worse

Check out Pinterest's own blog in We're Testing Out A New Look. With Bing and Google putting the squeeze on Pinterest's original monopoly of image copyright infringement with their own large-image display in image search, Pinterest is cornered into up'ing the ante:

Pins are bigger and we’ve added more information related to pins, so it’s easier to find things you’re interested in. For example, on each pin, you’ll see pins from the same board, other boards this pin was pinned to, and a whole slew of related pins.

That's right. Pinterest is planning to display even larger images than before, and showing a bunch of other thumbnails to the side, make themselves more "sticky" to the visitors and decrease potential visitor leakage to the creator's websites.

Some Terrible, Terrible News.

You heard it here first. Pinterest's greatest "contribution" to the internet is to set off a tsunami of image theft from every direction, inspiring countless websites to join the fray of image vampires.

Google has now rolled out a new Image Search - as if the search engine giant was trying to "undercut" Pinterest in the highly popular image-theft business.

Try it yourself: got to Google Images, launch a search query, and click on any image.

You'll see that Google now displays a large version of that image WITHIN GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH. That's right; Google has no longer confines itself to the use of thumbnails. Why not, since the copyright-infringement trailblazer Pinterest remains to this day free of serious legal challenges?

Adding insult to injury, Google has neglected to provide an opt out mechanism for webmasters to block the display of large images.

And here we are again, in some bizarre situation where we have to take action if we want our copyright to be respected.

Google, if it chose to do so, would have the ability to give webmasters a disadvantage in search engine results should they decide to opt out of image theft. This is quite a sinister development.

For more: Plagiarism Today.

The issues of Google hotlinking larger images or encouraging others to misuse images aren’t going to subside.

Quickie News Roundup

Heather Simone writes, in 'The Pinterest Trap':

I'm tempted to start going through my pins, going to the site the picture/craft is on, and bookmarking them through Delicious instead. Seems like a safer bet to me.

It's always nice to know that there are people out there that "get it."

In an unrelated, ironic twist, someone on the print-on-demand site REDBUBBLE sells an iPad case with the Pinterest pin design.

In Lawsuit Alleges That Early Pinterest Investor Stole The Idea, Pinterest Says Suit Is ‘Baseless’, Anthony Ha of Techcrunch reports that one Theodore F. Schroeder claims that Pinterest investor Brian S. Cohen stole his ideas. Whether this suit will get anywhere is debatable, but seeing Pinterest embroiled in an Intellectual Property lawsuit should bring in a chuckle or two.

According to a commentator:

I would say that being copied by another contemporary business entity is one thing, but having one of your founders/investors/employees/insiders feeding your inside info to a competitor, is something else, and def. worthy of a lawsuit.

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Today's best read comes from the University of Richmond's Journal of Law and Technology, and written by Stephanie Chau: A “Pinteresting” Question: Is Pinterest Here to Stay? A Study in How IP Can Help Pinterest Lead a Revolution".

Social networking sites flourish in the face of a narcissistic society. [...] unbridled self-indulgence and self-expression grew into “a more extraverted, shallow, and materialistic form of narcissism. [...] A vicious cycle ensues whereby these sites reinforce narcissistic behavior by rewarding the user with more connections or comments, and as those narcissists connect with other narcissists, the behavior mushrooms quid pro quo.

There is a lengthy discussion of legal concerns, including that attribution doesn't matter:

However, courts’ current fair use analyses are blind to the copyright holder’s involvement as well as attribution by the infringer,

This is particularly important:

A new inducement doctrine may be more helpful. In MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., the Court held that “one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”[82] Given that Pinterest does not ask users to consider permissions before each pin, its business model is distinguishable from that of Facebook. Moreover, Facebook encourages sharing personal experiences and photos whereas Pinterest encourages sharing content created by others. Just as Grokster distributed free software that allowed users to share electronic files through peer-to-peer networks, Pinterest provides an interface for users to freely share images.[83] Although there are provisions protecting the online service provider (“OSP”),[84] Pinterest must tread carefully to avoid crossing the inducement threshold.

In favor of copyright holders pursuing legal action against pinners, the following is noted:

If a Pinterest user loses a case against a copyright holder, the floodgates will open for other copyright holders to pursue similar claims. Disgruntled copyright holders will feel betrayed by the company. Users may eschew the system. It will take a complete restructuring of the core business for Pinterest to recover. Timing compounds the pressure on Yang. If a court rules before Pinterest can monetize, Pinterest may lose the opportunity to capitalize on the network it so famously achieved in the last two years.

The article is quite good at fairly presenting all permutations of events that can happen with Pinterest, good or bad, but the tonen is quite sycophantic. Still, great read.

Some almost get it

Back in October, I reported that Pinterest's new strike system was just a sham to appear to content creators that they are serious about copyrights, all the while sending their users letters absolving them from responsibility and giving them a little pity party.

My Blessed Life blogger Patricia Logan reports having received those toothless "strike" letters from Pinterest.

I got a note from them saying that they had to remove one of my pins due to copyright infringement. "Oh it was nothing I did" they said, It was against a person who either pinned it from the beginning, or they re-pinned it from someone else who did the pinning.

Ms Logan, much to her credit, shows that she has more brains than Pinterest.

If you (the guys who thought of this concept) have this wonderful site, which is a big hit, how can you forget there is a copyright law that as old as dirt? [...] The folks in Washington are all over this, and would love to see courts active in slapping fines on people and shutting down sites that do not adhere to the laws of the land, especially something so trivial as a copyright law.

It's almost a miracle that Ms Logan is reaching the right conclusion despite Pinterest's attempts to convince her she'd done nothing wrong.

Now I'm just being picky, but this is where Ms Logan makes an incorrect assumption, and incorrect assumption that even copyright owners often make:

P.S: Document and give credit to the person or site you got it from always works too.

Crediting the source is not enough. You always have to ask for permission. Credit or not, many content providers do not want to have their content displayed on websites other than their own, because they derive their revenue from traffic - and Pinterest takes their traffic (and revenue) away.