There has been a lot of web chatter lately concerning Pinterest and copyright infringement, in this post I will try to assemble some of the pieces and interject some of my thoughts / ideas.
I am still reading up all of this, I do NOT guarantee 100% accuracy, I’m writing this as I now understand it, I am completely open to adding to or making corrections if anyone is so inclined to point them out. This issue still seems to be rather fluid, and it’s getting more exposure on a daily basis.
First some basics:
Pinterest has recently changed some of its lingo, in the beginning before the whole copyright infringement issue appeared, Pinterest was against self-promotion, in a nutshell they were actually encouraging users to “pin” other peoples’ / companies images, they have now backtracked and now encourage users to only pin what is rightfully theirs. The problem here is for almost 2 years they let it get completely out of control, and I don’t see how they will regain any control.
Pinterest is being served up on Amazon.com servers, upon being contacted by the “artist Bill of Rights” a photographers’ lobbying organization, Amazon has agreed to process DMCA takedown notices. How long this will last is yet to be seen, I have a feeling it will be a drain on Amazon’s staff at some point and they will either force Pinterest to move, or they may very well in effect shut them down. I should point out that by Amazon stating they will “process takedown notices”, what they are really stating is that they will make sure Pinterest is “complying with the DMCA”, which can be read as “Amazon will forward any takedown notices to Pinterest”
The main issue at hand:
The main issue here is that when a user pins an item, Pinterest actually makes a copy of the image which is stored on the Amazon server, as opposed to linking to the original, naturally Pinterest has this covered in their TOS /User agreement, thus leaving the user/pinner responsible for the infringement.
When another user comes along and repins an item, this user should be free from any infringement, as in effect they are “linking” to the original infringed image. I need to do a little more research on this to confirm, but I’m fairly certain that’s how it works.
Pinterest is a traffic generating machine:
“Beginning this summer, Pinterest became the top social referrer for marthastewartweddings.com and marthastewart.com, sending more traffic to both properties than Facebook and Twitter combined. Pinterest is on track to become the second highest traffic driver (after Google) to Cooking Light‘s website, up 6,000% from just six months ago. The social bookmarking site already drives three times the amount of traffic to Cooking Light compared to Facebook.”
http://mashable.com/2012/02/26/pinterest-womens-magazines/There are those of the opinion of “this is a good thing, doesn’t everybody want traffic to their site?”
IMHO the answer is yes and no, naturally they want that traffic driven to their site (who doesn’t), but they also want that traffic turned into sales, subscriptions, and so on. Yes the site will still make money on showing ad and what-not, but that is mere pennies on the dollar, the real money comes from sales. Period.
I see 3 potential scenarios here… I’ll use Disney as an example, even though they are not known to be “trolls” they are known to vigorously protect their copyright /trademarks. Let’s say I pin a picture of Mickey Mouse, thus infringing on both the copyright and the trademark. This pin results in 1,000 hits to the Disney site, which is a good thing for Disney. Disney can see these hits coming from my Pinterest account, and they can also see that out of these 1000 hits, they sold 1 ticket for one theme park. At this point they could easily be happy with that 1 sale or they could just as easily send out a nasty letter demanding some obscene amount and threatening a suit. As we all know a percentage of people that get the letter will roll over and pay, thus that sale for 1 ticket, just turned into much more profit.
The second scenario deals with the well known copyright trolls (Getty Images, Masterfile, Corbis, Hawaiian Art Network and the rest.)
So I go to Hawaii on vacation to a really nice resort, this resort has a VK Tylor / Hawaiian Art Network image on their site, which I decide to pin as a testimonial to this great resort. Now the resort may have a license to use this image, but that does not give me the right to copy / pin it. As we all know the copyright trolling companies mentioned above would not think twice about sending out the demand letter to make a quick buck, they won’t care that you pinned it from another site, bottom line the image was copied.
And lastly let us say for example that Marthastewart.com, just loves the fact that her site is getting all of this exposure, they don’t care if they make sales or subscriptions, they are just content with the exposure, problem is they have no in-house photographer and they purchase all of their site images from Masterfile, most of these images are all Rights-Managed, but yet marthastewart.com encourages visitors to pin these items, they may even supply a little “pin me” button. Again the problem is they don’t have the rights to share this image in this way. Martha may not send out a nasty letter, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Masterfile will.
I will be watching this as it develops, as I believe this has the potential to become a mainstream issue, just because of the huge number of users Pinterest has. If suits start coming to users will users ban together and file suit against Pinterest for encouraging this, before doing their due diligence on the legal department??
Be sure to read the other posts on this forum in regards to Pinterest, as there is some good info available.
Resources:
http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/forum/legal-controversies-forum/a-great-post-regarding-pinterest-and-copyright/http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/forum/legal-controversies-forum/a-good-read-regarding-pinterest-and-infringement/
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