Pinterestist - A Hall of Mirrors

Infringing on infringed content of the copyright infringing platforms...
Enough to make anyone dizzy.

Pinterest clones and wannabes are sprouting like a plague of venomous mushrooms. The latest, "Pinterestist" at pinteresti.st adds an extra layer of frosting on the copyright infringement cupcake.

Pinteresti.st is a Pinterest-like staggered column layout Web site exclusively featuring screenshots of Pinterest-like staggered column layout Web sites. If you know of one I’ve missed, please submit the url or a screenshot. your chief pinterestist, r0b

And now we have screenshots of pages of infringed content.

It's doubtful that such a ridiculous concept will catch on and find adherents - it merely illustrates the desperation and the "creativity" displayed by all the small-time internet parasites out there hoping to cash in on Pinterest's popularity.

The only real "innovation" that Pinterest can be credited for is spearheading a mass culture of image copyright infringement. They sit back, with their skeleton crew and legal wranglers, merely providing a platform for users to scrape other people's content for them to exploit to raise venture capital at the moment, and some day, for profit. They sit back, their users a human shield against the copyright infringement lawsuit they so richly deserve.

If allowed to continue, Pinterest's true legacy to the internet will be to break its spirit of individual/expert contribution by eroding these contributors' ability to make a living out of their own work.

Meanwhile, every penny-pirate wants to emulate this great model of "stealing" other people's work by proxy, and without risk of legal action. Welcome to the most recent addition to the list, Pinterestist.

Good News and Bad News.

A mere 3 lines of code on your website will send a clear message.

The method described in Educate Pinners with .htaccess gives results like the one your see illustrated above in the screenshot. Pinners pin the image of their choice, but only if they look back at their pinboard will they notice the copyright-warning image that has been automatically substituted. If they notice the message, typically, they will erase it themselves - saving YOU the trouble of DMCA notices, and controlling the message that pinners receive when they infringe on your copyright.

All of this magic is accomplished with just 3 lines of code in your website's .htaccess file.

That was the good news. Now, for the bad news.

A surprisingly large contingent of pinners is so stubbornly imbued with its self-given right to grab an artist's content in order to gain some measure of approval from total strangers on the internet ("followers") that after Pinterest itself has blocked them from pinning content from one's domain and receiving a pop up message that pinning isn't allowed, they press on and pin anyway, in which case they end up pinning a substituted copyright-warning image instead of the image they wished to pin.

Now, you'd think that after receiving two manners of copyright warnings, the pinner would pause, and infringe copyrights on another hapless website that isn't yours. If you were to think this, you'd be very wrong.

For after these two copyright warnings, a shocking number of pinners simply double-back with their browser back-button to the image search engine result page where they originally saw your image, and pin from there.

Because you put it on the internet, and no matter how many times they're warned not to take it, they're going to bloody grab that image to impress strangers, and enrich Ben Silbermann.

It's going to be very, very difficult to change things. Pinterest will have to yield. But the copyright-infringement platform is just that, and doesn't show signs of wanting to go legit.

The Elephant Has Sneezed

Surprise! Never seen this before... from a website without a nopin tag.

If your artwork/photography is on a domain name that you own, you can notify Pinterest that you want them to block your website from pinning.

They have the technical ability to this, for they have done it. It did take months of screaming to get there.

No more endless recoding of ineffective nopin tags. While that does make things quite a bit easier for webmasters to manage, we're still dealing with an arrogant opt-out, rather than opt-in. It does beat thousands of take down notices.

What the message is missing is (1) an admonition to only pin their own images or images with a Pin-It button or (2) a link to a page on Pinterest explaining their users how to find images from the Creative Commons.

Dating Your Screenshots

Dated screenshots can be valuable evidence in the event of a lawsuit.

Screenshots can be forged.

Dated screenshots can be forged.

But so can a 5 dollar bill. Sometimes we have to do with the best we got.

In order to take a screenshot of the infringing material, you need to press the "PRINT SCREEN" key on your keyboard and paste in a graphic processing program. Not all of them work; the very basic MS Paint does. You probably have this program in your accessories if you have a PC. To take a dated screenshot, you need to pop up your desktop calendar, normally by double-clicking the hour/minute clock icon at the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

Pop up your calendar

Press the PRINT SCREEN key

Paste in suitable photo editing software such as MS Paint

Save, crop, and you're ready to go.