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.

Spying On The EMBED Code

Q: How widely used is the EMBED code?

A: Query this search string with your favorite search engine:
"Image Source * via * on Pinterest" - over half a million images embedded already.

Q: How many images are both misattributed to Google, and embedded in a 4th party website?
A: Query "Image Source: google * via * on Pinterest" - at least 30,000.

Q: How many are embedding images from your website?
A: Query "Image Source: mywebsite.com * via * on Pinterest"

These tips WILL NOT help you find the more literate webmasters that strip the code down to straight-up hotlinking.


Slowly, but surely, image copyright will be pinned to oblivion.

Pinterest: A Short History Of Dissent

FEBRUARY
Why I tearfully Deleted My Pinterest Inspiration Boards The floodgates open here.

Not Pining Over Pinning - Why I said Goodbye To Pinterest Because I've stopped to think about art. And about artists/photographers/writers/etc.[...] about what happens when the individual who made the piece can't control how it's used, but a corporation can.

Five Reasons Why I Hate Pinterest “OMG!!1 did you find this on Pinterest?”. Nope, actually found it on thebeautydepartment.com or other wonderful original content website/blog.

How Pinterest removed all my pinned images in minutes Note: Pinterest is now wise to this trick, it didn't work for me.

Pinterest Blocking Meta Tag Using the disallowing metatag is not a solution to the predatory behaviour Pinterest encourages.

Pinterest and “Pinning Etiquette” ...credit and/or a link is not a way to get around copyright infringement.

Thoughts From Others on Pinterest So Pinterest wants to make it easy for you to take any of the infringed work they have on their servers, and include it in any blog post you feel like. No need to license artwork. They’re teaching everyone to help themselves to the buffet of infringed upon works they have collected.

Pinterest: Delightful, Addictive, Theft ...more than early Napster, more than Megaupload, more than any government-seized hip-hop blog, Pinterest is entirely copyright-infringement.

Is Pinterest the new Napster? The rate of usage reflects the fact that, like Napster, those who use the service often become addicted to getting access to the best content in one place, in this case images.

It's Not A Secret There have been a few articles popping up discussing Pinterest’s use of Skimlinks, so we wanted to dive in and talk about what they are doing, as it’s not a secret or sneaky or covert, but a very popular, mainstream, and valuable approach to content monetization.

The Problem With Pinterest SO MANY of these are stolen photos my friends. Stolen from the photographers who took them, some who make their living off of them.

Pinterest Comes With Pros And Cons For Photographers The DMCA shields services like pinterest that display user content, but that doesn't mean that the users themselves are not in violation, it just means pinterest can't be held liable for the action. Pinterest is pretty disingenuous on this issue—their terms tell people only to post material for which they have permission or rights while knowing perfectly well that the services is designed for and encourages them to post material mostly without permission.

Is Pinterest a Haven for Copyright Violations? If someone pins a photo on Pinterest, they've created a competing version of the image, which could siphon image search traffic away from the source site.

Pinterest is Changing How I Blog I have so many fun ideas that I’d love to share, but I’d also like to create products out of those designs eventually… so it’s leaving me unsure of where to go from here with my blog.

Pinterest and an artist’s dilemma Pinterest is different. When you add a new pin, you’re asked for the address of a web page; the site loads the page, pulls a prominent image from the page, and shows it within Pinterest. While you’re viewing your friends’ pins, there’s no direct way to visit the original source; a source link is only available on the pin detail popup. (Clicking the full-size image or the inconspicuous source link above the image sends you to the source site.) These popups show images at full size, so there’s very little motivation for normal users to visit the original author’s site; the Pinterest user can view everything from his friends without ever leaving the site.

Pinterest’s Quiet Copyright CoupPinterest is merely putting the proverbial lipstick on their copyright abusing pig. Pinterest users can STILL save any image from any website, and upload it to Pinterest (removing any value to the originating site) where it can then be repinned into oblivion.

When did it become OK to take someone’s stuff without asking?[Pinterest] also creates a decent-sized copy of the image, which it hosts on its own servers and displays to Pinterest visitors. Unless you’ve got any desire to see the photo at its full resolution or want to find out more about a particular link, there’s no great incentive to look any further.

MARCH
Pinterest: A Broken Business Model So by their own admission Pinterest isn’t primarily for publishing original creative work, but republishing the work of third parties who almost inevitably will not have given permission. [...]Pinterest is a cynical exercise that enables and encourages others to steal and is profiting from those thefts, while simultaneously attempting to plead innocence and place the blame on those who Pinterest encouraged to steal in the first place. But when the lawyers come calling, as they surely will, Pinterest may find that by shafting both creators and consumers of culture they have precious few friends left to defend them.

Pinterest has a Loaded TOS… Don’t Accept it However, as a web developer who just had to put that snippet onto my clients’ websites I don’t think it’s a good direction to head where one business model requires every website on the Internet to opt out of their environment. Here’s a better idea… ask us if we want to opt into the Pinterest service… let those websites willing to play in the little sandpit of their business model to put a piece of code into every clients website.

Some More Pinterest Detective Work ...are they missing the hidden usage – that of Pinterest’s users monetizing others’ works in a commercial marketing way?

Is Pinterest a copyright time bomb? [Pinterest] relies on its terms of use to 'ensure' — and by that I mean a wink and nod — that all images are owned by the users who post them. So millions of users, using browser add-its for grabbing photos, are of course just doing this on their own websites, right? And if they're not, Pinterest would be shocked.

Could Pinterest become the next Napster? When you take it without payment, you effectively reduce the ability of artists, photographers to create more good stuff, because they are not compensated for it

What Does Pinterest Look Like Without Copyrighted Content? To continue existing, Pinterest is required to write terms of service that, if fully and actively enforced, would destroy the site.

Pinterest Founder Nukes His Own Account [Silbermann's] account, which had nearly a million followers and almost 4000 pins, was quietly pulled offline a few weeks ago. A modest replacement has been started from scratch. "Starting a fresh new account to remember how new Pinterest user's [sic] feel!”

APRIL
Copyright Infringement Made Cool Pinterest might claim that they have no knowledge of each individual infringement, but are they really unaware that infringement is taking place across a wide spectrum of their user base? Good luck convincing a jury of that.

Copyright Infringement Makes Me Buck Like Bodacious When the electric bill comes, you can’t tell the electric company, “I will credit your name to pay for the bill.”

Why I’m Not a Pinterest Fan: A Small Seller’s Point of View 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.

Copyright Infringement Makes Me Buck Like Bodacious When the electric bill comes, you can’t tell the electric company, “I will credit your name to pay for the bill.”

Pinterest Copyright Concerns ...if it is illegal I am sure something will be done.

The End Of The Road For Free Patterns I have been cornered into making a decision against my own wishes by an unstoppable copyright-infringement steamroller called Pinterest. AKA Napster-for-Images. [...] ...from now on, all the new patterns will be for sale, and only small thumbnails will be shown on the web pages.

Pinning a Lawsuit on You Perhaps the distinction between Pinterest and other internet sites is nothing more than its prominence and focus on image sharing.

Read the fine print; 'Sharing' can get you sued Luther says it's not enough to simply credit the writer, photographer, or artist whose work you're posting. You need to get official permission from the source, because sites like Pinterest, YouTube and Facebook likely won't stand behind you in a lawsuit.

Companies Using Pinterest, Be Careful Not to Get Pricked If the DMCA protects anyone, it is Pinterest and not its users.

Companies Using Pinterest, Be Careful Not to Get Pricked Like Grokster, Pinterest has not employed filtering technology to diminish infringing activity and employs a business model in which "the commercial sense of their enterprise turns on high-volume use."

MAY
No Interest In Pinterest I’ve reached critical mass in my frustration around my images being used without permission elsewhere on the internet, but particularly Pinterest.

Pinterest site's massive repository of RB artwork Now with 77 pages of objections.

Copyright Watch: The Liability-Proof World of Pinterest Pinterest puts all legal risk squarely in the lap of its users, while reaping the rewards of their free labor, the free content they upload and their growing appeal to potential advertisers.

Pinterest Traffic Drops Due To Copyright Issues Concerns over Pinterest’s terms of use, specifically ownership of pinned content, caused many dedicated users to delete accounts in fear that they would be held accountable for copyright infringement.

Pinterest - the next Facebook or unlawful copyright infringement? ...be aware that Pinterest’s terms also require you to indemnify them for any liability in using other people’s material; i.e. if they get sued because of what you posted, they can give you the bill and their lawyer’s bill too.

Could Affiliate Links Kill Pinterest? when Pinterest modifies a pin by altering the structure of a link, they stop being an online service provider facilitating users who share content and become a curator of content actively engaged in changing the way it gets shared. Put another way, changing a link could be construed as a form of editorial control.

Changing the Culture of Copyright: Though the Pinterest Terms of Service mandate that users post their own content or have permission to post any third-party content, in reality, the platform implicitly encourages users to pin third-party content regardless of whether the user has obtained permission from the content owner to do so and without necessarily attributing the source of the content. [...] Pinterest itself may be vulnerable to claims of direct and/or secondary liability. In MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd ., 545 U.S. 913 (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that Grokster and StreamCast (dba Morpheus) could be held liable for facilitating the commission of massive amounts of copyright infringement by end users who employed the defendants' peer-to-peer software to copy and redistribute music and films to each other's hard drives.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 7

Pinterest doesn't automatically delete images pinners have chosen as folder cover decoration (highlighted in red above)
following a DMCA take-down notice.

If you file a DMCA notice for an image, you'll notice that one of the two versions Pinterest fails to remove is the one that a pinner may have chosen to use as a folder cover image. That's right. They don't remove everything. Pinterest will force you to chase that URL separately.

If that wasn't annoying enough, the folder cover images are wrapped in script attributes that block Firefox from being able to fetch the image URL by right-clicking on it. A creator trying to protect their copyright not only needs to jumps through endless loops to get their infringed work properly taken down, he or she has to deal with a behemoth of a passive-aggressive organization working tirelessly against the rights of artists to retain the rights to distribute their own work. It's not in Pinterest's business model to give artists that don't want their images pinned any help.

While these images are smaller than full-size, they are mere decoration and lead nowhere, and making an image smaller doesn't automatically make it "fair use."

To find the URL of these folder cover images, you will need to view the source code. In IE, View>Page Source, and in Firefox, Ctrl U.

Search the page of code for the character string: uploads/cover and you will find the URLs of the infringing cover images. They are in this format:

http://media-cache-00.pinterest.com/uploads/cover_44965111168526458_44911116249811115_vcbpTZeT_1111198251.jpg

Party Time

First party: The copyright-infringement enabling platform, eg., Pinterest.

Second party: The agent of copyright infringement, aka the pinner.

Third party: The victim of copyright infringement, and the website the pinner is scraping content from, for the ultimate monetary benefit of Pinterest.

Fourth party: Through the intermediary of the EMBED code, a website utilizing images belonging to the third party, unlawfully uploaded to the servers of the first party by the second party, presumably in order to profit from the display of that pictorial content, just like the first party.

Should You Allow Your Images To Be Pinned?

Many artists and webmasters have to decide whether to allow their pictorial work to be broadcast by Pinterest with incomplete information.

RECIPE SITES
Do you have a recipe blog or website where large-scale off-site display of your image may result in increasing the number of visitors following the link to fetch your recipe? Your case may be one of the rare instances where Pinterest traffic may represent a valuable boost. Indeed, Google Trends show that the most oft-visited websites by pinners are recipe-related. Such traffic boost may make it worth your while to ignore possible erosion of your search engine rankings from duplicate content penalties and the damages from fourth-party webmasters exploiting your images through the EMBED button.

SALES
If your website sells products, and the images are little more than visual aids to promote sales, devoid of artistic embellishments, you may need to monitor visitor activity closely to make a decision. At this time, there are vastly conflicting results as to the worth of Pinterest traffic as a sales driver, ranging from "god-awful" to "amazing," so it's safe to assume that it depends on the products you are peddling.

CRAFT SALES
In the event that you are selling crafts or objects that while pretty, may have very little practical value to the owner, pinners may feel satisfied from viewing the image, aka being inspired, translating into very few sales. To be fair, this may be true whether the visitor browses Etsy directly, or comes to a specific page from a Pinterest link. The real danger here is a mass exodus of people browsing Etsy for "inspiration" and perhaps a purchase, to Pinterest for "strictly viewing." Instead of buying that special item they will "acquire" it by adding it to their pin/repin collection, changing how a craft is consumed as an object, to being consumed more as its image.

Over time, the proportion of images displayed that have been already SOLD will increase, and people may become leery of following links to Etsy expecting to reach a SOLD page. In many instances, normal consumer behavior would cause one to expect that a much-repinned craft image will lose its appeal as something representing one's unique eclectic tastes.

It should be noted that Etsy is NOT among the top 10 sites visited by pinners.

The high quality of photographs on Etsy and the artistic nature of what they depict make them prime targets for EMBED button exploitation, and the images will end up on the websites of lazy webmasters trying to cobble together micromoney-making websites on subjects they often know nothing about, using other people's content. These embedded images may frequently supplant the creator's own images in image searches.

Over time, one might predict that overall, the existence of Pinterest will be a lose-lose proposition for Etsy, as a direct competitor and sales black hole.

LICENSING
Photographers depending on licensing their images are very divided on the issue - as divided as there are ways to exploit licensing. While some worry about the popularity of some of their images on Pinterest making it near impossible to license, because no sucker wants to pay to display an image that is displayed for free everywhere, even at a higher definition or in another medium (like print), others seem to feel that the very display of their watermark may bring them more business.

CAFE PRESS STYLE MERCHANDISING
It's unlikely that the kind of activity on Pinterest will result in someone paying to buy your image printed on a T-shirt or a mug. Pinners are on Pinterest to look and share pictures for free, and have their egos stroked for their great imaginary style, not to buy merchandise - except for a few lucky impulse purchases, it's not clear whether it's worth having your images re-broadcast by way of embeding in fourth-party websites.

GENERAL TRAFFIC
For most other websites with have a traffic-based monetizing strategy, having their images reproduced on Pinterest is quite likely to be a traffic sink that is bound to hurt more and more as Pinterest grows.

General information websites range from mostly textual, with images as decoration, to completely pictorial. At one end of the spectrum, a site with much text, and few images, pinning these images may bring a trickle of traffic that may not otherwise discover the site, and be actually interested in the written details. Further, even if all the images of a website whose images represent 5% of the content, Pinterest will still only exploit 5% of that content, and any damage to image search engine rankings may be of little consequence.

At the other extreme of this same spectrum, a site with largely pictorial content could literally have its entire content copied over and over on Pinterest, meaning that Pinterest exploits 100% of that website's content, and erosion of the original content's search engine rankings for images for duplicate penalties favoring Pinterest-hosted images may have dire consequences. Pinterest's EMBED function simply add further injury after a fatal wound. Any traffic from Pinterest is likely to be unproductive, since an image-based website offers little more than what the visitor has already seen on Pinterest.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Unless search engines process Pinterest differently from other websites, having one's images pinned and repinned on Pinterest is quite likely to hurt one's organic rankings.

Images are subject to duplicate content penalties.

EMBED button leads back to pin page, not original source.

Overall, Pinterest creates many more links towards itself than to the original source.

Pinterest recreates each pin in 4 different size formats.

The multiplicity of some images on Pinterest, and all their repins, increases the likelihood that image searches will weigh in Pinterest's favor rather than the original source.

ON PRINCIPLES
An artist may want to share art and believe that no one should profit from the display and distribution of creative work on the internet and that making a living from art soils it, even if this means that in the long run, the quality and quantity of this collective body work is bound to decrease. Another artist may not have figured out how to monetize their work and be willing to give it away for others to distribute, and may appreciate the attention.

Some artists may not want their work on Pinterest simply on principle - even if they believe that upon the whole, they are neither winning or losing. They may feel that Ben Silbermann has no business becoming a millionaire off their work, combined with the work of their peers, taken without permission, and against copyright laws. They may not want their work posted on websites they do not approve of through the abomination that is the EMBED code. They may understand the importance, for the long-term survival of digital display of art on the internet, that copyrights be respected.

Exploiting Pinterest's EMBED Feature

The EMBED button is your gateway to DMCA-freedom and profits

Let's envision the profitable avenues offered by Pinterest's embed button. The EMBED button provides pirate-minded webmasters endless pictorial content without risking their hosting accounts for repeated DMCA take down procedures. Indeed, the EMBED button is a form of hotlinking; therefore, they are not uploading infringing content to the servers, and remain outside of the reach of DMCA-fueled deletions. The only way the webmaster's access to the images can be disabled is by removing these images from Pinterest's servers themselves.

Can an artist who has voluntarily uploaded their images to Pinterest keep these images on Pinterest, yet disable the EMBED feature to prevent other websites from exploiting them? The answer is "no." When the image was uploaded, the artist gave Pinterest the right to do distribute the images to pretty much anyone who wants to use these images for any purpose they please.

What happens when an artist submits a DMCA take-down notice to the webmaster's host? Nothing. Nothing, because the images aren't hosted on their servers. They can't help you.

What marvels can be done with this EMBED button?


Displaying advertisements around Pinterest-hosted images for fun and profit

The EMBED button opens up a treasure chest of free, hassle-free content. Webmasters can create pages targeting high-paying keywords for advertisement, decorate these pages with relevant images hotlinked, and slap advertisement, affiliate links, poker links, fad diet links, whatever they please.

Now, let's examine the actual EMBED code:

<div style='padding-bottom: 2px; line-height: 0px'><a href='http://pinterest.com/pin/230739180878793150/' target='_blank'> <img src='http://media-cache9.pinterest.com/upload/230739180878793150_B6F7kX5L_c.jpg' border='0' width='480' height ='320'/> </a></div><div style='float: left; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px;'><p style='font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;'>Source: <a style='text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;' href='http://www.papier-mache.com.au/blog/page/5/'>papier-mache.com.au</a> via <a style='text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10px; color: #76838b;' href='http://pinterest.com/ruthieandgrace/' target='_blank'>ruthie</a> on <a style='text-decoration: underline; color: #76838b;' href='http://pinterest.com' target='_blank'> Pinterest</a></p></div>

Translating this code into English:

LINK IMAGE OUT TO: http://pinterest.com/pin/PAGE-where-pin-is-displayed-full-size' OPEN IN NEW WINDOW

SHOW THIS IMAGE: http://media-cache9.pinterest.com/upload/FULL-SIZE-IMAGE.jpg' but make it a tad smaller than on Pinterest

UNDER THE IMAGE, TEXT LINK TO SOURCE: href='http://www.sourcewebsite/ with sourcewebsite.com

ADD A "VIA" attribution to THE PINNER and LINK TO PINNER'S MAIN PAGE:

via href='http://pinterest.com/PINNERPAGE/' OPEN IN NEW WINDOW

ADD LINK TO PINTEREST WELCOME PAGE: href='http://pinterest.com' OPEN IN NEW WINDOW

How an embedded image is meant to appear

This gives link juice and help with Google rankings to Pinterest for the "Pinterest" keyword, the pinner for the keywords "their-username", and the actual source for the keyword "sourcewebsite.com." Two link juice units for the Pinterest website, just one to the source website.

But of course, nothing can stop a webmaster from stripping this down to the bare minimum, and altering it; in fact, a webmaster with even the most basic skill-set will strip it to this:

SHOW THIS IMAGE http://media-cache9.pinterest.com/upload/FULL-SIZE-IMAGE.jpg' in full size

LINK IN TO MORE MONEY PAGES ON Pintere$t$craper.com

How an embedded image will appear, credit and Pinterest-outbound-links removed, replaced by profitable Pintere$t$scraper.com-inbound-links.

And that's all legit.

The image is displayed hotlinked, stripped of links, and credit. It's not against the law, and whoever uploaded the image agreed to this free licensing of their image, or, in most cases, for other people's images.