Pinterest: Is it good for artists?

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Alessandra Kelley

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(There's a general discussion of Pinterest on the Blogging & Social Networking Forum.)

Pinterest, the image-driven sharing network, has a lot of attention right now. I'm ambivalent about it, because while it appears to be a terrific tool for the visually-minded, it also seems to actively encourage image piracy.

Our own Medievalist has an excellent description of Pinterest on her blog.

There's a good description of it from a designer's perspective by Carina Chocano in the New York Times.

For artists and designers, Pinterest looks like a really useful tool for organizing imagery. It allows juxtapostion and collections of images to serve as visual inspirations, reminders, and research.

Unfortunately, the sharing aspect of things raises copyright infringement concerns. Kirsten Kowalski, a portrait photographer who is also a lawyer explains why in excellent detail in "Why I Tearfully Deleted My Pinterest Inspiration Boards."

I'm not an expert in copyright law and I'm not an expert in social networks, but this looks troubling.

Pinterest is a public sharing site, and there's where the copyright troubles start. If you dig into the details of Pinterest's terms of service, each user "represents and warrants" that he or she either owns the copyright to the images he or she uploads and pins, or has "rights, licenses, and consent" to them.

In other words, by agreeing to use Pinterest, its users swear that they have the right and permission to use the images they pin (Not just upload. It would appear by the legalese that each person who re-pins an image is also responsible for its copyright and permissions.).

The legalese is such that any penalty for copyright violation falls squarely on the users. It lets Pinterest off the hook.

There's a further complication. Pinterest actively discourages people from posting their own work. As Carina Chocano put it, "[T]he company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave." Kirsten Kowalski says "its first rule of etiquette ... is to not self promote."

But the only work a person has absolute free and clear copyright to is his or her own work. If Pinterest is encouraging people to only post other people's work, the chances for using materials to which one does not have copyright or permission increase.

Individual artists and designers may have a difficult time dealing with Pinterest image piracy, should it occur. Remember the case of Napster, which allowed users to share music files. It violated the rights of a large number of musicians who were represented by the RIAA, the trade organization which controls all rights to most recorded music in the US, a large, well-funded organization. When the RIAA sued Napster in 1999, it went with a huge budget and an army of lawyers.

If users of Pinterest violate the rights of artists and designers, those artists and designers are in large part isolated, self-employed, and without much clout. Each copyright holder is individually responsible for chasing down infringements on Pinterest and requesting that they be taken down.

I would be very interested to hear others' experiences with and opinions about Pinterest.
 
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Gale Haut

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I'm expected now to use it at work in tandem to facebook and twitter. But every time I get on it, I have very little idea of why we need an account.

I've also read a few upsetting articles about the Pinterest ToS being an ongoing abuse of IP for artists and photographers. And this opting out policy I see in Medi's post sounds like total bullshit to me. I don't remember a lot of authors getting on board with google books when Google laid themselves out under a similarly shaped umbrella.
 

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Pinterest is a public sharing site, and there's where the copyright troubles start. If you dig into the details of Pinterest's terms of service, each user "represents and warrants" that he or she either owns the copyright to the images he or she uploads and pins, or has "rights, licenses, and consent" to them.

In other words, by agreeing to use Pinterest, its users swear that they have the right and permission to use the images they pin (Not just upload. It would appear by the legalese that each person who re-pins an image is also responsible for its copyright and permissions.).

The legalese is such that any penalty for copyright violation falls squarely on the users. It lets Pinterest off the hook.

Alessandra, I'm no expert when it comes to such things but I know a few people who are, and they have all advised me to not use Pinterest because of the copyright issues you describe.

If one uses Pinterest in the way it seems to be intended to be used, one will infringe on people's copyrights, and one will be liable for that infringement. Neither the infringement nor the liability is good, and for that reason I won't be using it.
 

AbielleRose

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I've heard about the copyright issues with Pinterest but am still an avid user. I avoid things that could be troubling and mostly use it for recipes.

I may start second guessing my use of it after reading all of this, though. o_O
 

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If you're an artist with your own website, Pinterest is bad for your search engine rankings.

My experience with Pinterest, where my work was infringed to the tune of about 5000 images until I spent my summer on take down notices, is that I received extraordinarily little traffic from it given the number of links.

Pinterest's links are nofollow so they don't help with search engines.

There's more on this on http://pinterest-out.blogspot.com

Recently, a blogger an author fell into a copyright infringement speed trap:
http://www.roniloren.com/blog/2012/...can-get-sued-for-using-pics-on-your-blog.html

Recipe bloggers are reporting increased traffic but people have to follow the link through for the actual recipe. That's not the case for miscellaneous photos and graphics.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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If you're an artist with your own website, Pinterest is bad for your search engine rankings.

My experience with Pinterest, where my work was infringed to the tune of about 5000 images until I spent my summer on take down notices, is that I received extraordinarily little traffic from it given the number of links.

Pinterest's links are nofollow so they don't help with search engines.

There's more on this on http://pinterest-out.blogspot.com

Recently, a blogger an author fell into a copyright infringement speed trap:
http://www.roniloren.com/blog/2012/...can-get-sued-for-using-pics-on-your-blog.html

Recipe bloggers are reporting increased traffic but people have to follow the link through for the actual recipe. That's not the case for miscellaneous photos and graphics.

Hello and welcome to AW, Shea Kespear. Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm sorry it was a bad one.

I started this thread expecting to hear more back and forth, but it's really beginning to sound like Pinterest is nothing but bad news for artists and creative types.

I had heard about Pinterest's links being nofollow -- that is, that they do not actually link back to the original artist and so are not really of benefit to the artist.

This is looking more and more worrisome.
 

Shea Kespear

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Thank you fo the welcome!

I don't want to create confusion.

Pinterest does have links to the source, if the image has been pinned directly from the source. However, hidden within the link's code is something called a "nofollow" attribute whose sole purpose is telling search engines not to count that link towards the target's search engine rankings. Pinterest may be doing it to discourage spammers, but it is a fact that links on pins will not help your search engine rankings because of this nofollow attribute.

One of the worst thing that Pinterest does is to have a page that aggregates content pinned, website by website.

For instance, if there were pins from absolutewrite.com, Pinterest would create a page pinterest.com/source/absolutewrite.com that puts the most recent pins together.

Because of Pinterest's internal linking scheme, and the linking scheme associated with their embed code, this page with the aggregate content will rank very highly for the search query "absolutewrite.com" - potentially drawing some traffic from the source website.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Thank you fo the welcome!

I don't want to create confusion.

Pinterest does have links to the source, if the image has been pinned directly from the source. However, hidden within the link's code is something called a "nofollow" attribute whose sole purpose is telling search engines not to count that link towards the target's search engine rankings. Pinterest may be doing it to discourage spammers, but it is a fact that links on pins will not help your search engine rankings because of this nofollow attribute.

One of the worst thing that Pinterest does is to have a page that aggregates content pinned, website by website.

For instance, if there were pins from absolutewrite.com, Pinterest would create a page pinterest.com/source/absolutewrite.com that puts the most recent pins together.

Because of Pinterest's internal linking scheme, and the linking scheme associated with their embed code, this page with the aggregate content will rank very highly for the search query "absolutewrite.com" - potentially drawing some traffic from the source website.

Ah, sorry, I was confused. Thanks for clarifying that.

So Pinterest drains away other sites' rankings on Google when its members use those sites' images. This is not good.

By the way, may I suggest dropping in on the Newbie forum and introducing yourself? While this is primarily a writers' site, they welcome other creative types (obviously, cough, notawritermyself) and are quite a supportive community.
 

Flicka

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I use Pinterest mainly for ideas for my sewing, or research for my writing which means it's mostly old, out-of-copyright stuff (I'm heavily into the '20s and write hist fic), but I have been thinking about this. Same with Tumblr. People seem to be grabbing images from all over the place and never thinking about how they might have a right to use those images.
 

aibrean

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I deleted all my boards and then started back up from scratch. I never re-pin from others as my first rule of thumb (you can't easily tell whether they have permission). I pin my own content because I obviously have permission to. I also pin from sites that have a pin button on them (like DeviantART, Etsy and Allrecipies). I have also contacted some sites to see whether or not I can pin their content.
 

Gale Haut

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I don't think this was mentioned.

If you are hosting your own content on a website, you can add the following to the metadata and it will defer Pinterest's infringement.

HTML:
<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />
 
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