Pinterest's Fraud Triange

Pinterest's fraud triangle is a classic.

The "fraud triangle" is comprised of motivation, opportunity, and rationalization.

What is the motivation?

• The admiration of "followers."
• The admiration of "repinners."
• The admiration of "commenters."
• Satisfying a compulsion/addiction to "collect things" and "own" a vast digital hoard.
• Fantasy ownership, like "Second Life."

What provides the opportunity?

• The pinmarklet facilitates infringement.
• Pinterest supplies the platform.
• Pinterest supplies the social media context that makes up the "incentives."
• The belief that there is no legal consequence.

What is the rationalization?

• "No copyright infringement intended"
• Sharing is caring.
• "Artists will create anyway, so financial incentives are moot."
• Authors, artists and musicians are going to have to adapt to the new reality that I've taken it upon myself to distribute their work in their stead.
• I'm not stealing anything.
• I'm not using it commercially.
• Art is meant to be shared. By me. To gain the esteem of strangers on the internet.
• Don't publish it if you care about copyright.
• I'm giving you invaluable publicity.
• I wouldn't license your stupid photograph anyway.
• You're not losing.
• No one should make a living from artistic pursuits.
• Go mop floors.
• You should be flattered.

“Unfortunately finding talent and figuring out how to get in between them and as much of their money as possible is a great way to get real rich.”

– Thomas Edison

Does Pinterest exploit its users to get between content creators and their incomes?

Send The US Government A Message About Pinterest

DEADLINE FOR COMMENTS : EXTENDED Friday August 10 @ 5PM EST

Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator is asking for input from artists, musicians and assorted creators to "Help Us Shape Our Strategy for Intellectual Property Enforcement".

Make your anti-Pinterest sentiments heard!

regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=OMB-2012-0004-0002.

Recipe For Copyright Infringement

Another IP goose is cooked.

Pinterest has some copyright infringement competition. Was the pie too large not to be shared? Pasplore now offers the Pinterest clientele a website exclusively devoted to infringing on the copyrights of recipe publishers. No opportunity to profit from the enticement of bored women to "curate content," aka copyright infringement, shall be missed.

The brainchild of Chris Crittenden and Wes Dyer, Pasplore already boasts of "8,164 recipes saved from 1,333 websites and counting" on their welcome page. Like Pinterest, they have a counterpart to the pinmarklet, with which "you can save a recipe from anywhere on the web – any website, any blog no matter how obscure – with a single click."

No need to wait for an invite, Pasplore forces you to sign in with Facebook - that's your only option.

Not surprisingly, food bloggers are up in arms on Ask Chef Dennis. Wait until they find out that Pasplore itself is taking steps to protect its own intellectual property while stealing that of others: "Pasplore has several patent opportunities that were publicly disclosed at the beginning of 2012. We intend to file provisional patents this year[1].", and that Pasplore anticipates "implementing [their] revenue model in Fall 2012."

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.

Images Are Still Worth 1000 Words

Pinterest hurts

Available here through Creative Commons.

B-I-G D-E-A-L

So. In Pinterest Gives Copyright Credit to Etsy, Kickstarter, SoundCloud, we find out that Pinterest is making some "effort" to give un-editable attribution to some big corporate friends.

BIG.
DEAL.

These corporate friends are Etsy, a well-known online craft bazaar, Kickstarter, a funding platform that's probably just a publicity-hog anyway, and SoundCloud, a music-sharing website that allows a pinner to "pin" actual songs to their pinboard, with copyright-infringement issues of its own (see this article, although they are reputed to be meticulously pro-active in their infringement detection, quite unlike Pinterest).

Just like when Pinterest removed the word "sell" from their Terms of Use, and rolled out the arrogant nopin metatag that turned copyright on its head as something that doesn't exist for Pinterest until you recode all your thousands of static pages (in some cases) to affirm your copyright against their users, this is another completely useless news report that gives the appearance that Pinterest is making some progress on the respect-copyright front when it is doing nothing at all, as usual.

Attribution doesn't absolve copyright infringement.

Halting copyright infringement may not even be on Pinterest's agenda. This may be due to Pinterest's very existence and popularity appearing to be entirely derived out of the feverish infringement binge of its users, enabled by the convenient pinmarklet.

One cannot be surprised that when Pinterest makes headlines about copyright, it's not even about copyright. It's just more smoke and mirrors to coddle its users into thinking they're working really hard for us creators, and to seat copyright infringement on the thrones of angels.


Attribution is necessary, but over-rated.
The "money" rests in distribution, not fame.

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.

Pinterest Bracing Self Against Lawsuit(s)?

Several weeks after hiring Tim Kendall, Facebook's monetization man, Pinterest has enlisted no less than former Google Deputy General Counsel Michael Yang as its first General Counsel.

To speculate, it is possible that Pinterest will take advice and actually become respectful of copyrights and take serious steps to educate their users. It is also possible that Pinterest intends to unleash punishing legal challenges should any creator(s) dare to take them on.

If creators are hoping to continue making a living off their images and protecting their copyrights against the actions of Pinterest's users and those of present and future Pinterest-clone users, they must make their voices heard - they will have to scream at the top of their web-lungs. Begging "pinners" to try to understand their plight or educating "pinners" (something Pinterest seems loathe to do) on how pinning may hurt creators' livelihoods.

There are some that think creators have already lost the battle, and ought to give up their copyrights and associated livelihoods lest they become the "bad guys."

I’m wondering if everyone has come to the same conclusion: no company is ever going to bring a copyright infringement suit against a Pinterest user. [...] Sending a Pinterest user a letter instructing them to remove your copyrighted materials and accusing them of copyright infringement is [...] a total slap in the face.
-Catlan McCurdy

While Ms. Mc Curdy sides with the popular internet behemoth, the small artists continue to hurt: Ellen Ward, who publishes wonderfully spontaneous drawings, is another David against the Pinterest-Goliath.

Do we have a slingshot?

The Future Of Images On The Internet

Today, the spotlight is on you.

What is your principal source of revenue arising from the display of your art on the internet?

As an artist/photographer/creator, what measures are you considering taking in the short term to minimize copyright infringement?

What measures are you considering in the longer term?

What do you predict will be the ultimate effect of the erosion of image copyright on the internet?

Are there parallels to be made with the music industry?

Nasty Linking Practices

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Looking deep into Pinterest's code reveals some unsavory practices that hurt artists and photographer beyond the mere infringing upon their copyrights. Unlike copyright infringement, which is against the law, these sneaky actions are legal. What they are is a stark reminder that we are not merely dealing with gentle souls programming a nice little platform for the ladies to line up pretty pictures; we are dealing with an ugly, unscrupulous pirate without an iota of respect for artists' livelihoods.

Today, we will demonstrate that when Pinterest creates links to the original source of the material (the creator's website), Pinterest uses a sneaky "nofollow" link that tells search engine to NOT count this link towards PageRank credit for the target website. It is an instruction to the search engine bot not to follow this link for crawling and explore the creator's website, but to continue perusing Pinterest.

We will also show the flip side; when Pinterest creates links to itself, those links are NOT "nofollow" links, and that further, they are attempting to fool the search engines into thinking that "your-website-url.com" actually points to a page within Pinterest, that contains a partial aggregate of your material that has been pinned. I repeat: Pinterest attempts to fool search engines into thinking your website is on Pinterest.

The screenshots of the code below have been obscured in some places to remove identifying information.


In this screenshot, the outbound link pointing to the creator's website is a worthless, deprecated "nofollow" link. It counts for nothing in your search engine rankings, and slows down the rate at which your website would be crawled.


This snippet shows a pinned image with the alt tag "Pinned Image" pointing to the creator's website with a deprecated "nofollow" link. The significance of the "Pinned Image" anchor text is that even a search engine does not treat a "nofollow" tagged link differently, the search engine will credit the creator's website as being a "Pinned Image," sabotaging its search engine ranking with a non-specific anchor text that has nothing to do with what the image actually is.


This is a series of three thumbnail images of pins that point inward to Pinterest's page that aggregates a creator's images from a source website, on Pinterest's servers, in this format: http://pinterest.com/source/your-website-url.com. This inward link is NOT a deprecated "nofollow" link. By default, search engine bots will follow this link and continue to crawl Pinterest instead of being diverted to the creator's website. This increases the importance of the Pinterest page that aggregates your material in the eyes of search engines, and makes it float to the top of the results.

Pinterest actively hurts the source websites, while helping itself.


This last one is the nastiest of them all; using your website URL as the anchor text, Pinterest points an inward link to the page that aggregates a creator's images from the source website. This tells the search engines that they can find your website on Pinterest's servers, on this page: http://pinterest.com/source/your-website-url.com - rather than on your actual website. While search engines may not be completely fooled, they are fooled enough.

Typing my own website URL in Google's search box, the page where Pinterest aggregates my infringed content (http://pinterest.com/source/my-website-url.com) tops the page 2 results. It might be higher if I weren't so vigilant in removing infringed content.

Typing "redbubble.com" (a large image website with very heavy presence on Pinterest)in Google's search box, the page where Pinterest aggregates the infringed content (http://pinterest.com/source/redbubble.com) is the third result on page 1.

Typing "pinterest (the name of a webmaster forum)" in Google's search box, the page where Pinterest aggregates the infringed content (http://pinterest.com/source/redbubble.com) is the first result on page 1. The second result is another pinterest page. Only the third result is the webmaster forum, with Pinterest-related threads highlighted.

Pinners like to laud the "great publicity" creators are getting from having their work pinned and repinned on Pinterest. Some publicity! Pinterest's linking scheme, by design, is to steal traffic from the source websites, and decrease the share they deserve from organic search results.

The duplicate content penalties that are bound to arise, as outlined in the earlier blog post entitled: Clone Wars further compounds the problem. This post did not get the attention it deserved, it's a good idea to catch up on it.

Pinners are hypnotized by their illicit collections of pretty pictures - nearly all of them completely unaware of the unfair, underhanded way that Pinterest is trying to grab not only content, but traffic from creators. They believe that creators are getting good vibes from having their work pinned on Pinterest. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any extra trickle of traffic comes at a very high price; the loss of search engine ranking for website images, and the website as a whole, to Pinterest's benefit.

In fact, nearly all self-publishing webmasters are as unaware of the multitude of ways they are being wronged as the pinners themselves. They count visitors, check for sales. They're not looking deep into the downright evil linking scheme that in the long run, will rob them of more visitors than they will gain, while Pinterest makes millions off their work, and the visitors that should be theirs directly, without going the roundabout Pinterest way.

Pinterest is a vampire. There's nothing pretty about it.