We Will All Fall Unless We Stand United

Artists allowing Pinterest to scrape their content looks like a personal decision. On some levels, it is; an artist can evaluate how much referral traffic they are receiving from Pinterest relative to the number of infringements they allow, and decide whether that's worth losing control over the distribution of their images and websites everywhere hotlinking these pictures with links back to Pinterest.

One useful metric is the monthly referral rate per infringement. Suppose the following data:

1000 images pinned.
10 referrals from Pinterest per month.

In this simple example, referral rate is 1% per month, or 0.01 monthly visitor per infringed image. In other words, the content creator must allow 100 units of infringement in order to gain one extra visitor per month.

That takes care of the personal decision aspect.

Another important consideration is a collective one. Should the community of content creators, as a whole, embrace Pinterest?

• If people are looking for your content as text, or images, they have search engines at their disposal and they should find you directly, not with Pinterest as an intermediary.
• You are competing with Pinterest for a most valuable resource, visitors. Visitors can be expressed as the total number of time people spend engaged on the internet. This is a finite resource. The more visitors are engaged on Pinterest, because the content is there, the less motivated they are to find you with search engines, or even follow a link to your site from Pinterest. The more content we let Pinterest get away with, the fewer visitors ALL CONTENT CREATORS will have to share, with Pinterest getting, by far, the largest chunk of the pie.
• Some years ago, a webmaster could create a craft website, work on it for some years, and expect a reasonable amount of success and rank in search engine pages. They were then competing against other content creators with similar resources. Now, a webmaster wishing to launch a craft website needs to compete not with his/her peers, but with Pinterest, a place where everyone's best work is now aggregated. Success stories are expected to be extremely rare in such an environment.
• If enough content creators say "yes" to Pinterest, all of them will lose out in the short term, and more devastatingly in the long term. This is a heavy price to pay for an illusory trickle of traffic.

In Pinteresting or not? A look at #Pinterest, Rob O'Hara observes:

If it sticks around long enough, I can see Pinterest taking a slice out of the blogosphere — specifically, blogs that are set up for the sole purpose of sharing pictures. Why manage an entire website for pictures when you can just point picture to your Pinterest collection?

You don't need a crystal ball to see that one coming.

We can do our share to stop it. We can stand united against Pinterest, and contribute to keeping the internet an environment where citizen-publishers can make a living without being robbed by crowdsourced scrapers like Pinterest - like it's meant to be.

• BOYCOTT pin buttons.
• EDUCATE fellow artists wherever opportunity arises.
• REMOVE all our pinned content via DMCA notices.

Thank you!

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.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 8

After a DMCA take-down using their online form, Pinterest does not remove every version of your image.

It keeps two, sometimes a third, all of which are publicly accessible, and very much hotlink-able. Two are very large.

This is such an egregious violation of the DMCA safe harbor, nothing else needs to be said. Be sure never to use their online form. Always email them a list of all images as instructed here.
Ouch.

What Pinterest Must Do To Get Along With Copyright Holders

~ If We Actually Respected Copyrights ~
A Pinterest To-Do List

Have a function where a webmaster can request that ALL images from his/her website that are already pinned be removed everywhere on Pinterest without having to chase them individually.

The default state for a website is that pinning is not allowed. To allow pinning, site must be enabled by webmaster. Critical traffic mass has been achieved - awareness of Pinterest is high enough that sufficient numbers of webmasters will enable pinning.

Print-on-Demand (POD) site users should be able to submit image URLs that they disallow even if the POD site permits pinning sitewide.

Make a serious effort to educate their users, geared at encouraging pinning from own material, Pin-It buttons, and Creative Commons. Educate users about finding images from the Creative Commons.

Remove all publicly accessible images targeted by a DMCA take down notice. If images that are taken down need to be retained for some legal reason, let that be in a place not accessible by anyone but site admin and with password protection. Right now, an image that is taken down can still be hotlinked by clever fourth party websites.

Ditch the EMBED button entirely. Many people that don't mind having their work pinned are horrified with the prospect of having their images embedded on unknown fourth party websites.

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.