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.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 6

Writing an effective DMCA notice to Pinterest


Better not to use the online form provided by Pinterest.
It's horrible.

An effective DMCA take-down notice is one that will allow you to wipe off all repins without having to chase them individually.

Pinterest's online form will only allow pin pages, not images, making it extraordinarily useless in the case of medium to large scale cases of infringement. Further, a single error in a multiple submission will wipe the form clear and the entries are not recoverable, forcing you to give up on multiple submissions in favor of individual submissions.

To work around these Pinterest's attemps to discourage you from enforcing your copyrights, you must email them your DMCA request direction. For this, you will need to re-format all image location URLs. If you don't specify every version of every image, they'll be more than happy to leave them on their servers. They are not there you help you; they are there to help themselves keep your content and leave their users as unmolested as possible by your take-down requests.

You will notice that the infringing image URLs are in this format:

http://media-cache7.pinterest.com/upload/265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_c.jpg

Pinterest has many caches ("media-cache1," "media-cache2," "media-cache3,") and some versions dedicated to international traffic. In order to remove images from any of their many servers, you will start by stripping off the beginning of each image URL:

http://media-cache7.pinterest.com/upload/265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_c.jpg

This code will remain for each image:

265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_c.jpg

Right now, your image is stored in 5 different formats. This may change as the site evolves, Pinterest may decide to change the way they name these different format filenames, or add new ones. To delete them all (as they are named to this date), change the letters in the URLs to have a version that ends with a b, a c, an f and a t - in addition to a full-size original without a suffix.

265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_b.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_c.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_f.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_t.jpg

Mail your letter to this address: copyright@pinterest.com

Below is an example of a formatted letter with the required legal declarations included:

Remove these images from your servers (IMAGE LOCATIONS):
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_b.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_c.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_f.jpg
265647077990199904_cbzqsk1u_t.jpg

They are from my website (LINK LOCATIONS):
http://widgetpropellers.com/index.html


I state UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that:

I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use).

I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the copyright or of an exclusive right under the copyright that is allegedly infringed.

This information is accurate.

Pintere$$$$s$$$t

Pinterest valued at 1 billion


If Pinterest really is worth 1 billion,
no one can dispute that it is a worthwhile target for a lawsuit.

According to a source on TheNExtWeb (TNW), "this most recent round of funding is said to include Bessemer, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark," and Rakuten. They have raised between 100 to 120 million fresh millions of dollar in funding, depending on the source.

Rakuten, a giant Japanese e-commerce company that already owns Kobo, Play.com and Buy.com is a lead investor."When asked about potential copyright infringement issues, Rakuten responded saying that Pinterest will ultimately overcome such problems. "

We hope they are wrong about this.

One billion may actually be an underestimate for the worth of all the content that Pinterest users have scraped from unwilling or unknowing third parties.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 5

Google Image To Image Search.

The Google Image/Image search is an amazing new feature which is derived from Google's use of sophisticated image recognition functions to satisfy a need to eliminate duplicate images from Google's Image search. You may have noticed that over the years, the old problem of seeing the same picture over and over again in Image search has disappeared. Now, Google allows its users to harness this powerful tool for their own purpose. Thank you, Google.

Go to Google Images, and type in your search term, example, "widget propellers."

If you find an image that's yours on the page, click on it, and drag and drop in in the search box which will automatically enlarge when you hover over it. Like this:


Image/Image search is a revolution in your ability to detect infringements on your graphical content.

Your search result page will point out all your indexed image's twins on the internet:


Scan this search result page for images attributed to Pinterest.com.

Open in fresh tabs, collect link and image locations.

NOTE: Currently, pins appear poorly indexed in this feature. It's not impossible that Google considers Pinterest's content so likely to be duplicate content that it applies a severe penalty against it in its Image search, but this is just speculation. Using the "site:" command in Google Image does yield a bevy of Pinterest Images, so they are in fact indexed for Google Images. There are mysteries.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 4

Using the SITE: command on Google.

Google's SITE: command is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to locate your content. It allows you to search a site specifically, in this example, Pinterest.com. Enter the site: command with your domain name in the format below in Google's search:

SEARCH: site:pinterest.com "mywebsite.com"


Using the site: command to locate Pinterest content misattributed to Google yields an astonishing 14.4 million results.

The search will yield both pin boards, and individual pin pages (recognizable by a URL with a long string of number). Pin boards appear to be more reliably indexed than the "deeper" pin pages, so many pin pages are actually missing from Google's database altogether and will not show up on search. Examining a pin board to find your content is a tedious chore. Use your browser search function to find your domain name on the pin board. Some pin boards have a reasonable number of pins that Pinterest serves to your browser in a single pass.

Tragically, many pin boards are little more than poorly managed electronic hoards, and scrolling to the bottom of the pin board will stimulate Pinterest to serve you another helping of pins. If you still haven't found your image, scroll down again for a third helping. To reach the bottom of a completely full pin board, you may need to repeat this 10 times. Some electronic content hoarders may even surprise you with a link to a second page when you finally reach the bottom of the first page.


Click on "more search tools" on Google Search page's left hand menu.


Some useful features include pages created or changed in the past 24 hours or past week, as well as "page not visited" if you're starting to lose track.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 3

Make use of Pinterest's flawed and unsophisticated search function.

This is hit and miss because it depends on pinners placing your content in intelligible categories (as opposed to geeneric "stuff I like"). Type the command below this in your browser address bar, replacing "red+black" by keywords that may describe your material. Don't forget to add a "+" sign between words:

http://pinterest.com/search/?q=red+black

The address bar should look like this:


You'll see a variety of images:


Scroll down the page, you might recognize your images. Same routine: for each image, open a tab, collect link locations, image locations, and chase down the pinboards of the repinners for more of your images.

SPECIAL NOTE: search result pages are very rarely updated. Weekly perhaps.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 2

Don't forget this multi-page search tip

In your browser's address bar, replacing "mywebsite.com" by your own domain name, type the following:

http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/

This page represents a selection of new, original pins, directly from your website. Repins don't show up on this page. Recently, it has been updated close to real-time. In Firefox, open the thumbnail images in new tabs. For your DMCA notice, you need the LINK-OUT URL and the IMAGE location on Pinterest's servers. The Pin URL is quite useless, if you choose to report Pin URLs instead of Image URLs, you'll spend a lifetime chasing repins. Do not use the DMCA interactive form on the Pinterest website. Right-click on the large images and COPY LINK LOCATION and paste in an Excel worksheet, followed by COPY IMAGE LOCATION, also to be pasted in the Excel worksheet.

Type the following addresses in your browser's address bar, replacing "mywebsite.com" by your own domain name, as you might uncover older, original pins:

http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=2
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=3
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=4
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=5
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=6
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=7
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=8
http://pinterest.com/source/mywebsite.com/?page=9


Pages stop at 9.

You might find quite a bit of hidden material there. Again, from all these images, click and open a new tab. Then from these tabs, collect the LINK LOCATION and the IMAGE LOCATION.

PRO-TIP #1: Find the ZOOM OPTION in your browser's View Menu. It will shrink everything on the page, so that you'll see more images per screen shot. You may have to squint to read the works, but Pinterest isn't for reading!

PRO-TIP #2: Even if your multi-page search comes up empty, and you've had all of its content removed via DMCA, IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE ISN'T MORE OF YOUR CONTENT. You could still have thousands of images on Pinterest. A lot of is simply doesn't make it to that page.

A Spammer's View of "Pin Hags"

The image pinners wish to project.



Busted.

How spammers view pinners (excerpts from Black Hat World Forum):

Don't get these glamorous pictures fool you, Pinterest is mostly older, fat ass women spending all their time on the internet, lazily clicking on pictures to pin them and getting their egos stroked for their amazing taste.

They're dreaming about high heels and castles but trust me, what I make money on is the peddling of donuts and limited edition Pop Tarts. [...]

WHAT SELLS

Thomas Kinkade crap

Amazon grocery products with quality photos: donuts [...], fruit and nuts [...], gift baskets [...], chocolate & candies are super hot [...], chocolates with really nice pictures [...], shit like these cupcakes sell like mad [...], candy apples [...], cute shit with jelly beans [...], 12-flavor gummy bears [...] - you get the idea.

Trendy shit like decorating items with seashells that you can put in their own folder. Example: [...]

ANY EFFING ANYTHING WITH HEARTS. Just search Amazon with the "heart" keyword in Home & Garden. They have heart-shaped measuring cups that no pinning hag will want to be caught without. You could fill up an entire fake account with heart junk merchandise. [...]

Niche stuff targeting the gullible and more likely to follow the links, like a folder of merchandise with Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

Bacon products, they'll pretend it's for their husbands but it's really for them [...]. I tried the bacon thing as a joke, now I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

AVOID

Dresses (overdone, and pinners won't fit in them anyway)

Electronics (reading instruction manuals is intimidating)

Jewelry (looks spammy)

Diets. These gals love to eat more than they love to diet. Give them food instead. Easy food, none of that hard-work recipe business.

Craft stuff. They like to look at it, not do it.

Link to Google Trends

See the other websites that the pin hags visit?

1. yummytastyrecipes.com (FOOD)
2. helpwithweightloss.org (OPPOSITE OF FOOD)
3. onegoodthingbyjillee.com (FOOD)
4. sixsistersstuff.com (FOOD)
5. plainchicken.com (FOOD)
6. zhishuba.com (NO IDEA, CHINESE SITE, NOTHING LOADS. SITE PROBABLY EATEN)
7. chef-in-training.com (FOOD)
8. the-girl-who-ate-everything.com (FOOD)
9. realmomkitchen.com (FOOD)
10. iknowhair.com (HAIR - probably EATING IT)

Hacktivism vs. Consumerism

Let's be realistic
"Dumps" not likely to go viral on the Pinterest crowd

Hacktivism is the exploitation of the internet, through means that weren't necessarily intended, for the purpose of spreading a social message.

New Forms of Hacktivism suggests pinning pictures of Occupy protests, infographics about climate change, quotes from Malcolm X or Naomi Wolf, garbage dumps or even Walmart. "The first time I posted an image of two women kissing, I got a complaining comment from a woman who said her granddaughter used the site and she didn’t want her exposed to things like that. Expose!"

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 1

Learn to recognize an original pin from its repins. This can speed up your DMCA take down chores. Although an "ancestor" pin and its subsequent repins all have different PAGE URLs, they display the same IMAGE URL. Do not submit PAGES in your DMCA take downs, as Pinterest will remove the page, and not remove the associated repins. If you submit IMAGES, then all the repins will be neutralized with a single request.

STEP 1

Take note of the number on the pin PAGE in the URL. This one is:
261912534548757080.


STEP 2

Get the image location by right-clicking on the image. Copy and paste in a text editor like Notepad or Word. This one is:
http://media-cache1.pinterest.com/upload/261912534548757080_nKv5Q8vY_f.jpg

Notice that the digit string for the IMAGE is the same as the digit string for the PAGE above (261912534548757080).

When the image digit string and the page digit strings are the same, that means we are dealing with an original pin taken directly from the wed. This is the "ancestor" pin.




STEP 3


Find the links to the repins. Do not click on the repinner's name, click on the repinner's FOLDER. There are two repinners here, but we only need to follow one for this demonstration.



STEP 4

You have reached the repinner's pin board. Find the repined image. Here, it is dead center in a page with few images. You may need to scroll a lot, or search for keywords to identify this image on the page. If there are a great deal of images, you will need to scroll down to the bottom repeated to stimulate the Pinterest server to fetch even more of that folder's pins. Click on that image.



STEP 5

Take note of the number on the pin PAGE in the URL. This one is:
29836416251403328.

Get the image location by right-clicking on the image. Copy and paste in a text editor like Notepad or Word. http://media-cache1.pinterest.com/upload/261912534548757080_nKv5Q8vY_f.jpg

Notice that the digit string for the IMAGE is NOT the same as the digit string for the PAGE above, but it is the same as that of our "ancestor" pin.

This means that we are dealing with a repin.



It is hoped this will help creators find their way around the Pinterest maze - at least you will be able distinguish original pins from repins.

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.

Pinner Hall of Shame?

Welcome to the rarefied atmosphere of obsessive pinning. Do these users really do have the right to upload, say, 40,000 images to Pinterest's servers? Can they show permission for every image? Are they protected against a lawsuit for registered works, carrying damages from $15,000 to $150,000 per image, plus attorney fees, and paying for Pinterest's lawyers in addition to those of the plaintiff? Is it worth it? The more images are uploaded, the greater the risk of getting sued, and the more likely the damages will be maximal as they are when willful infringement can be shown. What arguments, if any, can be made that the copyright infringement was not willful in the case of someone with 70,000 pins?


Jan Galbraith - 34397 pins


Joanne Giroux - 35841 pins


Marcy Rupp - 36458 pins


Valerie Thorpe - 38156 pins


Janessa VanOefellen - 38165 pins


Janie Lane - 38798 pins


Elaine Nasser - 39406 pins


Kathy Jackman Hutchison - 41409 pins


Kim Kiwi - 43652 pins
1% handbags


Lilly Styles - 44640 pins



CasaBella Interiors - 45834 pins
Disclaimer: "Pins are not our own property"


Monica Bourne - 50693 pins
"I'm an obsessive collector of inspirational and useful pictures [...]. And I compulsively organise everything."


Pascale De Groof - 55223 pins


Mayann Rizzo - 61503 pins
That's a lot of "being authentic" with other people's content.


Mary Beth Burrell - 78933 pins
Is there an image she doesn't like?


Christine Kysely - 80570 pins
"Visual Content on my Pinboards is owned and copyrighted by its respectful owners."
Why would a self-described artist and photographer infringe on the works of others to the tune of 80 thousand images, and admit it?


Lise Lemay - 80680 pins
Probably on the missing person list.


Teresa Powell - 82903 pins
There could be a few expensive lawsuits in those boards.


Luann Lang - 106740 pins
Please capture, drag away from the computer and air out in sunlight.




Pin Hammer - 23 pins