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.