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.

Another Photographer Deletes Pinterest Account

To Delete My Pinterest Account Or Not To Delete?

Well, Microsoft and Apple and Pixar and Geffen Records and Capital Music have come together to put an end to as much piracy in their industry as possible, by spending HUGE amounts of money to file lawsuits and chase down the thieves. Problem is – as professional photographers, we don’t have the deep pockets that these companies have. What do we do? Well, we spread the word. We join together. We take a stand. We educate people. We share our thoughts on Blogs and Facebook and social media. And we start one person at a time….. and do the right thing.

Studio 314

It's Not Just Images And Recipes, It's Comics, Too.

Don't you miss the days when I posted 2 comics a week, instead of writing rebuttals to Forbes and dealing with bullshit like this?
- Matthew Inman

Our topic today is the Funnyjunk.com vs. The Oatmeal debacle.

If you're not familiar with The Oatmeal, you are missing out on a deliriously funny collection of cartoons and illustrated essays by Matthew Inman, a cat-loving, horse-hating geek with an astute sense of observation.

Now, meet Funnyjunk.com, little more than a Pinterest for comics. Below is Inman's description of Funnyjunk's business model:

1. Gather funny pictures from around the internet
2. Host them on FunnyJunk.com
3. Slather them in advertising
4. If someone claims copyright infringement, throw your hands up in the air and exclaim "It was our users who uploaded your photos! We had nothing to do with it! We're innocent!"
5. Cash six figure advertising checks from other artist's stolen material

Sounds familiar? Right now, Pinterest doesn't have advertising, though it is partnering with stock photo sites for revenues, is recruiting vast amounts of venture capital, and has hired Tim Kendall so the writing is on the wall.

Inman complains that Funnyjunk.com has "practically stolen [his] entire website and mirrored it on FunnyJunk."

The owner of Funnyjunk.com has responded." He hired one Charles Carreon, whose claim to fame was to sue sex.com, to demand $20,000 from Inman for defaming Funnyjunk.com on the internet. You know this is true because it's not possible to make up things like this.

In answer to this ridiculous demand for money, Inman counter-offered to donate, from a donation campaign targeting his fans, the required amount to charitable organizations of his choice (National Wildlife Federation and Cancer Society). He raised over $200,000 so far.

On June 21, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it will represent Matthew Inman against a "bizarre lawsuit targeting critical online speech." Does it stop here? No, as Charles Carreon himself is now suing, on his own behalf this time, "Inman, the two charities, and the online fundraising platform IndieGoGo, claiming trademark infringement and incitement to “cyber-vandalism.”" Carreon dropped the law suit during the first week of July.

There will come a time when all of the web will miss the days when content creators were publishing abundantly, instead of fighting against user-based content scrapers like Pasplore, Funnyjunk and Pinterest hiding behind the DMCA safe harbor.

Etsy Loves Pinterest

Being pinned is a thrill for some.

People that sell things tend to find Pinterest useful. Maybe that's why Rakuten, the behemoth Japanese e-commerce company, invested millions in Pinterest. Maybe that's why Pinterest is conviently hosted on Amazon'z servers.

Etsy Shopkeepers appear to appreciate having their images pinned. In fact, they rave about the flattery and the exposure, responding to being pinned much in the way that pinners expect. Minor objections seem to center around pinners wanting to make the projects themselves rather than purchasing the items. There are, unfortunately, very few quantitative evaluations of actual Pinterest traffic and conversions from the Etsy shopkeepers.

The Print-On-Demand (POD) site 1x.com, after toying with the "pin it" button, has removed it. In the words of founder Ralf Stelander, "We have decided to remove the pinterest button, it generated very little traffic anyway."

One might guess Pinterest may not doing much for the POD business model.

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.

UNPIN With Love

Since Pinterest won't let you "link with love"
consider "unpinning with love" instead.

The "LINK with love" idea was judged to be important enough to warrant its own domain name, with a .org, perhaps to convey pure, non-commercial motives.

"LINKwithlove.org will have the greatest impact if we work together and multiply our online presence. Showing support for LINKwithlove.org means displaying your badge to show you understand, appreciate and respect the value of intellectual property and you commit to leading by example. In other words, you LINK with love*."

By linking with "love," what is meant is mere crediting of the source.

No doubt that intentions are noble, and goals lofty; it's a pity these are based on unsound principles. Creators aren't necessarily looking for credit, and many business models are based on controlled distribution rather than fame or name recognition. To respect the "value of intellectual property" requires asking artists for permission, which will be granted or not depending on how they make a living from their creative work. Proper credit doesn't cut it.

Sadly, despite the gentle and respectful emotions that underlie this colorful, well-designed and thought out campaign, Pinterest ensures that all "love" is completely stripped from all outbound links. Pinterest itself nullifies the best intents of these very kind, well-meaning pinners, deliberately, and in a rather shocking manner.

In a recent post, Nasty Linking Practices, we examined the pernicious nature of Pinterest's linking scheme, which, while as self-serving as anyone might expect, is nefarious to the source websites' presence in search engine results; it can easily be interpreted as an intent to grab some of their rightful, natural traffic. In light of this calculated scheme perpetrated by Pinterest on the websites whose content it enables its users to mercilessly scrape, perhaps a more useful campaign would be "UNPIN with Love."

To UNPIN with Love, you need only delete all pins for which you have no permission or that aren't in the Creative Commons, regardless of correct attribution. There is no better way to show your appreciation for the creative community than to return what never belonged to you in the first place.

You can show your support for the "UNPIN with Love - I know better now" campaign by pinning the image below to each board that you have cleaned up of copyright infringement. Be proud of the badge! All images below are in the Creative Commons. Feel free to use anywhere you want to spread the word.

Like A Plague Of Locusts

If you think it's already difficult to chase your content on Pinterest's servers, imagine what it will be like when some of its clones start to become popular.
There are many ways to join them if you can't beat them - joining Pinterest and posting your pictures on it is the least imaginative and the least profitable.

There is better!

SEO Toolster markets a Pinterest clone script, reasonably priced at $749, with free installation. Cogzidel offers you Pinderful, another remarkably similar knockoff for just $299. The aptly named Pinterest Clones, produced by Social Curation Solutions, features a similar app for under $200.

These scripts are shockingly faithful reproductions of Pinterest's look and functionality. It's a wonder that Pinterest isn't suing them for... copyright infringement.

Some of the clones are already trying to make inroads with different target clienteles. Many have chosen to concentrate their efforts on a language and a country (this may explain Pinterest's recent urgency in trying to go international). Others are jumping on Pinterest's cast offs, and specializing in pornography.

Why not jump on the copyright-infringement gravy train, and run your own Pinterest? Call it "Pinfringe." It's probably a lot less work and more money than what you are doing now, something that is almost always true of dishonest work.

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.

The Image Is The Product

"An Image Is Worth More Than The Object It Represents"

Welcome to the digital age.

Many pinners have convinced themselves that artists ought to be eternally grateful for the publicity. They haven't noticed how few artists are posting their own content for their own publicity on Pinterest. When pressed, they'll argue that posting a digital representation of an artwork, a craft project, or a landscape photograph, cannot possibly hurt the sales of that product, on the contrary!

Not to single out pinners, many attorneys, photographers, writers and visual artists themselves still have a view that the only avenues for profiting from one's artwork is to sell the work itself, or its reproduction on less expensive media ranging from coffee mugs, calendars, giclee prints and t-shirts, or by licensing rights to the ever-shrinking print media, or internet news behemoths like CNN.

It is often thought that multiplying the images of the object on the internet in no way interferes with the sales of the object, so why should artists complain? The more the object is seen, the greater the likelihood that it will be purchased by someone. Pinners justify themselves thinking that they wouldn't have bought licensing rights to the image under any circumstance, such that the artist isn't losing any licensing income. They are, after all, only looking.

In the digital age, the image of the object has become the product.

The image is consumed through the viewing of it.

Self-publishing artists can profit from the distribution of their images for viewing on their own websites, supported by advertising sponsorship. The images can be displayed on their own as sources of inspiration, or simple viewing delight. They can be essential decoration to how-to articles. They can support ideas and help with brand recognition. None of these strategies to profit from one's images involves sales of physical objects of any kind.

The artist's ability to profit from self-publishing is eroded when pinners contribute to the building of a large, central marketplace of image consumption. Pinterest, as a central viewing marketplace is not only populated by the artist's own images (forcing the artist to compete against his/herself), but it also conveniently features the added bonus of the best work of many other artists.

In the aggregate, the consumers of digital images will be satisfying their viewing needs in the new, more convenient central marketplace, stripped of intellectually-demanding accompanying text, and have no incentive at all to consume images in their dispersed and non-uniform original sources.

If there is any doubt that it is the image itself that is consumed, kindly refer to this article: Pinner Hall of Shame?