Pinterest An Affiliate of Photo Licensing Site?

Follow the money brick road...

It appears that Pinterest may have worked itself into becoming an affiliate site for iStock Photo.

Please be aware that the Pinterest website is a member of our Affiliate program. The iStockphoto team which handles the affiliate program, continually monitors the usage to ensure it is in line with the program.

The use of the word "affiliate" comes with the expectation that Pinterest would receive commissions for licensing revenue that is generated by traffic referred from its pages. In other words, if someone follows the link to an image posted on Pinterest and purchases rights to use this image from, in this case, iStock photo, Pinterest would receive a commission.

It's not clear why anyone would want to purchase rights to a photo that's all over Pinterest, that's already on a pinner's own pinboard, or that any webmaster can hotlink to from the Pinterest servers without worrying about copyright infringement (Pinterest has the "rights" to distribute the image according to its ToS).

Not much noise has been made to make the photographers on iStock photo aware of this affiliate scheme - possibly because this news might upset some of them.

The money pie isn't infinite, ultimately, who pays for Pinterest's commission? To whom is the burden transferred? Now, and over years?

Is such an affiliate relationship a reason why a photo licensing site would be ignoring copyright violations?

How much extra revenue could this possibly generate? One might suspect "close to zero," but what are the real numbers? How many pinners care about copyright enough to license a photograph? And for what? Their blogs? Their fashion magazine empire? The travel books they are writing? Someone looking to license a photograph won't be looking for it on Pinterest when stock photo websites have convenient search functions.

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.

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."

Pinterest Can Afford Higher Rent

According to Business Insider, Pinterest has moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco, 808 Brannan Street.

Their swanky new digs are at the "Fashion Center" - a 2-story building from the 30's with big windows.


View Larger Map

From the Urban Dictionary

PINTERVENTION
When an intervention is needed to drag your wife off pintrest [sic].

"This is the 25th day in a row, it's time for a pintervention."

PINTERESTING
A word to describe a digital image just before someone infringes on its copyright by handing out rights to distribute it to a website called Pinterest, without the permission of the image's creator..

"Oh, this is pinteresting! I will add this to my digital image hoard on Pinterest! Hopefully I will earn the approval of my followers when they repin the image to their own digital hoard, copyright infringement is so worth it. God forbid I should consider the consequences of my actions on the person who created this pinteresting image."

Pause For A Chuckle

Feeling social media fatigue? The antidote is here.

Awareness, Action!

If you have a Pinterest account, and have a few minutes, do REPIN from http://pinterest.com/pinhammer - maximize the number of pinners that get to see these graphic copyright messages in the general feed.

Block My Website Please

Devina Divecha writes, in Pinterest — friend or foe?, "I cannot, in good faith, become a Pinterest user until the copyright infringement issues are resolved." She continues: "The website itself is trying to provide a temporary fix to those concerned about copyright by providing an “opt out” code for blog and website owners, who can incorporate into their websites preventing people from pinning their work."

Temporary fix? Never mind the "opt out" code being a temporary fix, Pinterest has the technical ability to easily block pinning from any website from their end. Is Pinterest bothering to tell people about this much easier fix for webmasters? No, of course not. Pinterest wants to make it as difficult as possible for artists whose content is infringed upon.

Anyone interested in having their website blocked from pinning doesn't need to bother recoding anything. Just write an angry letter to copyright@pinterest.com and they will do it for you.

More Music Lessons

In Music Lessons, we made some parallels between the piracy-induced decline of the music industry with Pinterest, and predicted a similar decline in the availability and quality of image content on the internet. The article in refence, David Lowery's Letter to Emily White has gone "viral" and the phenomenon has given rise to numerous rebuttals along with the praise.

The comments to the rather toothless rebuttal article A WSJ Intern Replies To An NPR Intern’s Viral Post on Music Piracy are more revealing than the article itself. While one commenter bemoans, statistics in hand that

"[...] recorded music has gone from a $12B business in 2001 to a $6B business in 2011. About 35% of that 19% is 7900 Petabytes which was 11 billion movies consumed that people didn’t pay for. That is why Home Video has gone from a $26B business to an $18B business. Pirate Bay is the 81st most popular web site, more popular than Netflix and way more popular than Spotify. ISPs made $50B in 2011 selling a service that comes with free music, free movies, free software, free games and free books. the solution is for ISPs to obey the law and terminate repeat infringers."

another commenter adds, taking a completely different angle:

It’s not because we’re poor, we’re just living in a high speed world where we want access to EVERYTHING… EVERYWHERE and it’s services like iTunes, Spotify and Pirate Bay (listed in descending order of benefit to musicians) that are providing us with that.[...]This will cause a total lull in musical creativity, inspiration, originality and general interest in music until the industry devolves into being a totally non profitable market for anyone because no one will care to consume it anymore. It’s bleak, man.

Interestingly, a more robust rebuttal of David Lowery's piece on Boing Boing has elicited some angry backlash... against the rebuttal itself:

"The issue, for me, isn't whether millions of hobbyists can squeeze out $100 a year while technology companies skim millions from the transactions, but whether a professional class of musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, etc. can still exist in this country."

"Morrison posted an opinion that "we shared music when it was casettes". And then didn't bother to inquire whether the amount of sharing in any way equated to digital sharing."

From the camp of "Love The Art, Hate The Artist":

"Do you know any musicians who make music only for money? I don't. They make music because they can't stop themselves from making music. And they have day jobs."

"Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock."

"If you want to sing, sing. But, for God's sake, stop complaining about how you're being oppressed because the rest of us don't want to support you while you do it."

"It's been coming for awhile. Musicians have officially become boring."

"The free content crowd doesn't value artists. And they're nasty about it too. Nicely done."

Until Pinterest came along, graphical content was largely untouched by piracy. Ben Silbermann has found a way to tap into this poor cousin of "sharable content" with a platform geared towards the hoarding of third-party digital images by its users, adding a further leaching of creator's copyright with an embed feature that is little more than a gateway to a hotlinking free-for-all of this infringed content.

What is the adaptive path for visual artist with respect to their partnership with the internet?

REDUCE CONTENT. Reduce definition. Reduce size. Reduce availability. Institute a pay-per-view. Charge for website access. Educate the masses.

We may be fighting Pinterest now; tomorrow, we'll be fighting hundreds of Pinterest clones.

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.

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.

Dear Artists,

Dear Artists,

We've grown up to your music, we've wept to your poetry, we visited places from which we saw your photographs, we crafted projects from your instructions, we've been inspired by your painting styles.

It's the digital age, and you're going to need to adapt. We're downloading your music and sharing it with friends and strangers on the internet. We're posting your writings on our blogs, because ideas are free. We're sharing your arts, crafts and photography on Pinterest and other platforms. We will give it all to Pinterest and Grokster to distribute and profit from because they conveniently put everything in one place, and for free.

How you're going to make a living from your creations is your problem, not ours. You're just going to find a way to adapt and make money without copyright protection. Art is meant to be shared, get on with the program. If you can't figure out how to make a living with everyone distributing your content where they bloody well please, suck it up and go wait on tables.

Once again, thank you for the inspiration and making the world a more beautiful place. We're looking forward to complimenting you by handing off your work to Ben Silbermann, making him rich rather than you, but especially getting kudos for our refined style from our "followers." Remember, it's publicity! You should be grateful.

Genuinely appreciating artists as always,

The Pinners

This, above, is the message that pinners are sending artists/creators. They really do hate the artists as much as they love their art.

Quoting a comment from Julie Meyers Pron's blog Pinterest: Educate Your Users About Content Theft, "I haven't contacted any of the users because I know from past experience the hateful reaction you get when you ask people not to break copyright & reprint your recipe."