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.

Pressuring Pinterest & Pinners

Everyone who has raised a child knows how difficult it is to be heard by those little ones when they have decided that they just don't want to hear.

How can artists get pinners' attention? Words will fall on deaf ears, therefore, all we have left are actions. They do, after all, speak louder than words.

Public relations:
(1) Google "pinterest copyright infringement" - click on "more search tools" on the left menu and select "last 24 hours" or "last week" and make sure that the anti-Pinterest voice is one of the first in the comment sections of articles about Pinterest. Enlighten the audience on what pinners seem to understand the least: how Pinterest "publicity" doesn't help every artist's business model, that it doesn't help yours, and that it's not their right to make the assumption that artists seek fame above all, and saddle us with endless DMCAs take downs.

(2) Log in to your Pinterest account, and repin copyright warning images from Pin Hammer's pin boards

If you have your own website:
As instructed in this post Educate Pinners With .htaccess, hijack pin requests to substitute an image containing a stern copyright warning.

If copyright has occurred, you have some options:
(1) Be vigilant with your content and serve as many DMCA notices as necessary, emailing copyright@pinterest.com, not the automated form on Pinterest's website. The blank frames where images use to be will linger and serve as a reminder that infringement has occurred and that there are artists that do not welcome it.

(2) Log in to your Pinterest account and post some version of the below in the infringing pin's comment section:

You have posted my image without permission. By taking away my lawful right to distribute this image and handing this right to Pinterest, you are making it more difficult for me to earn money from my work. You are helping Pinterest make money from my work instead of me. Please help artists continue to be able to derive an income from self-publishing on the internet by not pining their work. I'd rather you remove the image, but if you really want to keep it on Pinterest, my licensing rate for every posting/re-pinning on a Pinterest pinboard is $250.00/yr. Again, I would prefer if you remove the image because Pinterest has no hotlink protection.

To quote a commenter on Pinterest announces new terms of service & that private boards are coming soon:

Despite first necessary changes to protect the Pinterest founder from major lawsuits the conflict with copyright persists. The majority of pinboard owners still do not and will not care about copyright. Also Pinterest can trust that the majority of copyright owners will not take the effort to constantly check illegal pins. From my point of view Pinterest tries to get away with a “dirty deal” between them and their users (silent agreement to tolerate uncounted copyright infringement)as cheap as possible. Only if and when copyright owners (can) protest they will finally do something. I do not think that this is a basis for an ethical business conduct.

WE NEED TO KEEP THE PROTEST ALIVE. EVERY DAY.

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.

Educate Pinners With .htaccess

Have your own website? Here is a chance to educate the pinners with a message, and stop pinning at the same time - all with a single piece of cut-and-paste code that can disable pinning sitewide. Two birds with one stone.

Simply add the code of your choice, below, to your .htaccess file. When attempting to pin an image from your website, unbeknownst to them, the pinners will be posting something completely different, that will be seen by all their followers! There is a lot of potential to reach pinners with this method. The images are hosted on flickr.


To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm8\.staticflickr\.com/7099/7286791720_017f7f2cba\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm8\.staticflickr\.com/7220/7203313120_708e9a7229\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm8\.staticflickr\.com/7080/7167093018_58b755d606\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm9\.staticflickr\.com/8158/7003734640_55920c978d\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm8\.staticflickr\.com/7238/7003187122_e1a58a8202\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm8\.staticflickr\.com/7084/7002973012_8535692c4e\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm6\.staticflickr\.com/5275/7000674678_c5a1b80ba4\.jpg [R]

To use this image:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Pinterest [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://farm8\.staticflickr\.com/7080/7107060703_aec6eba365\.jpg [R]

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.

Clone Wars

Pinterest vs. Your Image's Ranking In Search Engines


Search engines are largely unable to pick an original from its clones.

Search engines routinely discount "duplicate content" from their result pages, in order to provide a more varied user experience. Image recognition technology allow search engines to identify duplicate images as well, and purge them out of their Image searches.

How do search engines distinguish the original content from its duplicates? The short answer is: "THEY DON'T." They are not able to recognize an original form a copy. The image that beats the clones is the one with the greatest "weight" as measured by imponderables like backlinks, anchor text, and page rank - the exact kind of scheme that repeated repinning of an image will favor. One could predict that a much-repinned image on Pinterest will handily supplant that of the original, under current search engine practices.

Oftentimes, a page with a link to an image on a third-party website will rank higher than the page with the actual image. It's safe to say that the process is quite imperfect.

We don't know how search engines will handle images hosted on copyright-infringement platforms like Pinterest in their ranking algorithms. It is certain, however, that Pinterest's copies of one's images represent a clear danger to the ranking of one's original images. They almost certainly will, in many instances, supplant the original in terms of ranking and hurt its visibility and credibility on the internet, unless a search engine manually punishes Pinterest-hosted images with a penalty.

When a artist decides whether to allow Pinterest users to scrape their images and upload them to Pinterest's servers, he or she will often be blinded by flattery, and noble notions of free sharing. Few will consider the possibility that their original image's rankings will be hijacked by Pinterest's many copies, diverting their hard-earned traffic to Pinterest's benefit.

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.