Issues Of Copyright ~ Is This The Death Rattle Of Pinterest?

“Connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” (Pinterest Mission Statement)

There’s been a lot of talk around the interwebs this morning about Pinterest, and more specifically, whether they would dump their users like a hot potato and run should a copyright owner of an image, or article, or website (or any other intellectual property, for that matter) ever decide to sue a pinner.

I adore Pinterest, I really do.  Prior to Pinterest exploding onto the interwebs as a beta in March of 2010, most of us kept lists of bookmarks or favourites up there in our toolbars, where they took up large amounts of space and weren’t very pretty.  Then along came this beautiful site with full colour images and we were sold.  We wanted more.  Most of us have a page (or nine) for dream homes, stuff that makes us giggle, words of inspiration, crafty endeavours, recipes, and any other topic you can imagine.  Checking Pinterest became a part of every day, as did repinning the awesome stuff we found.

We all just did this naturally – much the same as we would have had we and our girlfriends been flicking through a magazine together over coffee.

“Wow, that table in Better Homes & Gardens would look fantastic in that new house we’re thinking of building.”

“See how those flowers would match the wedding dress I tried on last week?”

“This picture of a cat that looks like Christina Ricci is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year!”

…and on it went.

None of us went about maliciously collecting images or articles or funny motivational sayings with the view to passing them off as our own.  We just pinned what we thought was good.  And for the vast majority of the time, we had no idea who the original owner of the image or article was.  If we did, most of us gave credit where credit was due.

Unfortunately, this is the nature of Pinterest.  As it grew, and as more and more people repinned the same images over and over, the ‘ground zero’ of each item was lost.  Some of the more savvy of us followed a link directly through to the originating website with the view to pinning it ‘from scratch’ again, perhaps as a way to help protect the content copyright, but that in itself is flawed too.

My husband (TBA) is a part time semi-professional photographer.  And he’s damn good too.  He has posted many of his images to RedBubble.com, a legitimate site that allows artists to sell products based on their photographic and artistic work – postcards, calendars, tshirts, prints and so on.  To make an item available for sale, you have to upload a high-resolution image (each artist can elect to sell varying combinations of products, but as an example, if you want to sell a large canvas print – RedBubble produces the print and ships it – you can see why a low-res image upload would be a bit silly). Furthermore, you cannot place a watermark on any image that will be up for sale, for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately, TBA has had some of his images ‘lifted’ (either from RedBubble directly via screen capture, or from third party sites that had themselves stolen the work) and they continue to flood the internet, some attributed to the original copyright owner, ie, TBA – but most not.  They’re on blogs, charity and church websites – one was even being used as an e-book cover (which was being sold for profit).  You only need to do a Google image search for “Lonely Jetty” to grasp the scope of this problem (ours is the one with a little girl walking alone) – unless the source is ‘RedBubble’, the image was taken, in almost every case, without permission.  And that’s just one image.

Imagine then, an unsuspecting soul stumbling upon a gorgeous image on a blog that they want to share, and using the “Pin It” bookmarklet (toolbar or website) to add it to Pinterest?  They have no idea that the site they just pinned from isn’t the copyright owner.  If an image or article is being represented (via deception or just plain omission) as the site’s own, then the original pinner probably thinks they’re doing the right thing by pinning directly from the ‘source’.

And that’s not the half of it.  In regards to ‘dream home’ pins in particular, most of us are just collecting the pins without even bothering to click through to the original source websites.  We repin to our own boards because we are identifying with, or enjoying, the images.  And we’re ALL guilty of ignoring the fact that we do not own the photographs we are repinning, nor have we sought permission from the website owner, or the photographer who took the images (even if contracted by a larger organisation, a photographer will generally retain copyright ownership over an image, even if they assign permission for a third party to use the images for a fee)

We just pin.

We’re not stupid – we all understand the need to protect artists’ work.  And it would be very easy for me to be grumpy about the stealing of TBA’s intellectual property and the resulting reposting of it around the web (and, naturally, on Pinterest). After all, that’s a potential loss of income for us.

So here’s where it gets tricky for me.

I repin things all the time.  I pin recipes, and printables, and pretty pictures of wrap-around porches, and funny phrases.  Hell, I even created my own ‘motivational poster’ (in response to the umpteenth waif I saw being paraded as ‘thinspiration’ on Pinterest’s very own boards), which I included in a blog post, pinned to Pinterest myself, and that is now on the first page of Google search results for “Pinterest”.  No, I don’t source every pin.  Nobody does.  I don’t expect people to look up who owns the copyright to “Dear Pinterest”.  I understand the nature of the game.

BUT.

As a non-legal type who loves Pinterest with the fire of a thousand blazing suns, it is a very hard pill to swallow to be told that I’m probably breaking the law every time I pin something.  And not only that, but that I am completely and utterly liable for any damages or court costs should a copyright owner decide to sue.

Not only my own court costs.  Pinterest’s as well.

That’s right.  In those terms and conditions that nobody every reads – a fact Pinterest is likely banking on – it clearly states that we accept the costs of Pinterest’s own legal team should they be prosecuted too.

Does anyone else think that this reeks of entrapment?

Think about it.  Pinterest has covered their own butts so well that even if a site member USES THE SITE IN THE WAY IN WHICH IT WAS INTENDED but has the bad luck to be cherry-picked and prosecuted for doing so, Pinterest themselves walk away scott-free.

How does that even work?

How do the creators of a site specifically set up to operate in a particular way that might get us sued think throwing a few legal words at us in the Terms and Conditions completely removes their own complicity?

Pinterest is set up to make it as easy as humanly possible to repin someone’s work.  There’s no landing page asking ‘Are you the copyright owner of this work?’ when you hit ‘Repin’.  Descriptions are editable.  There’s no way to conclusively prove that where you’re pinning (or repinning) from is the originating source of the work.  If someone decides to say ‘this is my image’, or ‘I wrote this tutorial/article’ or ‘I created this art’ – a casual Pinterest user hasn’t got a clue that it’s not true.  This just isn’t a few people who are too silly to bother checking sources.  This is the vast majority of the site’s members.

Pinterest has responded to recent copyright infringement issues by releasing an ‘opt out’ code that site owners can add to their pages to stonewall a reader’s attempts to pin anything.  But this doesn’t help the tens of thousands of people pinning directly from Google searches.  Or repinning from within Pinterest itself.  It’s a half-measure.  Pinterest enjoys ‘safe harbor‘ status – the code, along with providing a recourse for copyright owners to insist that infringing images and content be removed, fulfills their ‘obligations’ as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

So why does a site like Pinterest even exist, if the risk of prosecution is so great? Why hasn’t someone stepped up and said ‘This system is broken, let’s rejig things to protect the users against liability for doing exactly what we created the site to do in the first place?’ or even create some sort of protection for pinning things internally so at least the wonderful community that has developed over the past year or two can continue to thrive?

Pinterest, protect the people who supported your idea from the very start, who helped you get many millions in funding, and who made you one of the biggest internet sensations of 2011.

Don’t throw your users under the bus.

Further reading ~ because I know I’m not done with this issue yet.

• Pinterest.com And Copyright ~ Sean Locke Photography (updated 29-Feb-12, also worth searching his site for ‘Pinterest’, for other posts he’s written about this subject)
• Not Pinning For Pinning ~ Love Life (updated 29-Feb-12, hat tip for putting me onto the Sean Locke post)
• What People Are Talking About: Pinterest & Copyright ~ Build A Little Biz (updated 29-Feb-12)
• Is Pinterest A Haven For Copyright Violations? ~ Hub Pages
• The Great Pinterest Divide: To Opt Out Or Not ~ Plagiarism Today
• Information For Bloggers And People Who Use Pinterest ~ Living Locurto
• Pinterest’s Quiet Copyright Coup ~ Direct Match Media
• Is Pinterest The New Napster? ~ LLsocial.com