Quote from: sjlocke on May 11, 2012, 12:46

The mechanism is there.  It's called "go-to-an-online-site-and-license-an-image".

The mechanism could be better. What if you could license an image for blog/web use without going to an agency site? A faster, one-click pay-and-post system where you could see an image on Pinterest, click a button to quickly license it (paid through google wallet or something similar) and post it on your blog.

So then you'd have to pay pinterest a commission as well as your agency, sort of like the Veer/Alamy thing. Unless pinterest was setting up as an agency.
Otherwise you'd have to have this on every site on the web. Someone might see an image on any site and want to buy it. And again, you'd have the 'extra commission' bother. (OTOH, one might take the view that half of a (usually) meagre commission is better than none).

That's also the problem with them thinking that they can clear themselves of copyright responsibility just by offering a 'no pin' code. You (currently) can't force legitimate buyers to put a 'no pin' code on their site, but pinterest seems to think it can say 'that photo didn't have a nopin so they didn't mind'. What if the site owner hadn't heard of pinterest or 'nopin'?

So then you'd have to pay pinterest a commission as well as your agency...

Or the agencies could pay to be a part of it. If someone pins an image direct from an agency site, a "License It" button would be visible on the Pin page. Or if the image can be identified as being available on a stock agency site. If the image is available on multiple sites, either the agency that's paying Pinterest would have the transaction go to them, or multiple options would appear. So maybe it's a 2 or 3 click process then. But still easy and do-able.

There was something like this with Google Images at one time. Maybe it's still around. With a certain plugin or extension you could browse Google Images and licensing options would come up for any stock images shown. Something similar could be built into Pinterest, where if a stock image is pinned, licensing options are visible. And this would replace the Embed option. For images that need a license, instead of Embed the only sharing option would be "License It".

Hi,
I am new here.  As an image copyright-holder, I'm very interested in any regarding Pinterest. 
If your material is the subject of large-scale copyright infringement, kindly get in touch with me through the PM system.

Who are you?
Why should we 'get in touch with you'?
What are you going to do about it?

piccsy is another photo sharing / discovery site which is being compared to Pinterest - and which has been generating a bit of buzz recently.

Bruce Livingstone is involved and frequently mentioned in the PR although it is not his company.

Personally I don't care if someone ads my images to his board. What makes me angry is the possibility of embedding of images to another website. I could start new web without paying for images and it would be more or less legal - according to Pinterest.
http://www.northsideseo.com/pinterest-copyright-linkbuilding/

More on the embed code:

http://pinterest-out.blogspot.com/2012/05/exploiting-pinterests-embed-feature.html

It's going to take another generation to properly sort this out.  Today, there is no chance of getting a lawsuit in front of a judge who actually understands concepts like hosting vs. linking, or the subtleties of something like an EMBED tag.

In a nutshell, when we say Pinterest is "hosting" we mean it makes illegal copies of copyrighted material, and then lets other people use those copies any way they want.  Pinterest intends to make money, probably by introducing ads at some point.  The users may be profiting in any number of ways:  for example, the 'pinned' page might be part of a sales presentation.  So both Pinterest and its users are making money from imagery created by other people, to whom they've paid nothing.

I don't know how much simpler or more obvious this has to be, for people to see that it's plain wrong - even if it's fun, and lots of cool people are doing it.  I was especially impressed by the logic offered by another MSG poster, in another thread: his young daughter used imagery lifted from web sites for a school project; her teacher apparently thinks this is ok; therefore it must be ok for Dad too.  It's a beautiful concept: people now making ethical judgments based on what their kids can get away with.  

Quote from: stockastic on May 25, 2012, 16:05

It's going to take another generation to properly sort this out.  Today, there is no chance of getting a lawsuit in front of a judge who actually understands concepts like hosting vs. linking, or the subtleties of something like an EMBED tag.

Won't work on the next generation.
For about the last five years I was teaching, it was almost impossible to communicate to the weans how serious 'cheating' in exams is, since the word has become totally acceptable through games cheats.
Although I and the computing department at least tried to get over to kids that while they could look for legally available (e.g. PD, CC) images to use in school projects, in real life there were copyright laws, the weans definitely looked at us like, "Old people. Clueless."

I get what you're saying,  but I guess I'm hoping that even in the future, judges (when they grow up) will still understand the law, and if they also understand something of the technology, "chop shops" like Pinterest will eventually be shut down.  Napster isn't coming back; people have decided that although they can ship MP3s around to the friends, a business based on that concept isn't acceptable - even if it pretends to be ignorant of how its servers are actually being used.  

On the other hand, if society simply no longer accepts a concept of intellectual property or copyright, then the laws will be taken off the books, and we enter a different world.

Quote from: stockastic on May 25, 2012, 17:08

On the other hand, if society simply no longer accepts a concept of intellectual property or copyright, then the laws will be taken off the books, and we enter a different world.

Yes, a different world where there is no financial benefit to any artistic endeavor.  Seems like that world will be pretty barren of creative works.  People will be too busy making a living in areas that do pay wages. 

I don't imagine for a moment the world will be barren of creative works. There's super stuff on Flickr and DeviantArt and many other places where people can be truly creative, free of commercial restrictions. People paint, do crafts, make music, film, dance and loads of other creative things for love. And these works of love can be truly creative and excellent quality.

At some point the pendulum will start swinging back.  People still understand compensation for creative work - they just pretend they don't, because the Internet is still new, still a magic place where the old rules don't apply and everything is free.   Once the internet becomes really, truly commonplace - just a medium, accessed by appliances - old social contracts will reassert themselves. 

It seems to me that working to keep our legal rights is a better plan than letting them be lost and hoping that someday somehow "old social contracts will reassert themselves".

It's hard to counter something like Pinterest, while it's still new and everyone thinks it's just, like, totally cool.  It took the big money of the recording industry to bring down Napster.  It doesn't matter how many pathetic DMCA takedown notices Pinterest receives, and they'll have plenty of money for lawyers - that had to be part of the plan right from the start.  Successful legal action would have to come from someone as big or bigger than Pinterest.  Or are you suggesting we all contact our Congressmen?  Celebrity recording artists could get their attention. Stock photographers can't.  

How can meaningful pressure be brought against Pinterest?

A few years ago Google Images was full of results direct from iStockphoto. For more or less any stock photo search.

Today much less so. Is that a good thing ? I believe that many people would prefer that iStockphoto would again be better represented at Google Images. The probably reasonable assumption being that this helps push sales. Equally my guess is that the only thing worse than having your images pinned is going to be not having your images pinned. It is important that the agencies work to be on the inside track here. Rather than picking fights, they need to make it work for them.

One thing I am curious about however. In one of the Jonathan Klein interviews he seemed to hint towards collecting based on page impressions or traffic. I wonder what the model for that would be from the artists' perspective.

Photoshop helps remove watermark. Thieves!!! Ps must be banned immediately!! Oh wait there are other software, multiple new ones will coming out!!! These thieves are lined up against poor microstockers!! They must be banned!! Ban sofware!! This software is based on math thievery to alter watermark pixels. Ban math!!! Mathematicians are crooks!!! They should pay taxes to microstockers for learning a watermark altering science!!! ...and all this software can downloaded from teh internets! By people!!! An army of thieves hunting for my $0.3 picures!! Let's ban teh internets and the people!!! : ))

I'm sorry but most of you people are a sad joke. Head in the sand & pi%*ing against the wind at the same time, a real circus act. While talking about law and rights, you also managed to call just about everybody using the net -except you of course- a thief. Just wait till they take notice of that and get a lawyer to shove it down your throat.... rightly so.

So lets recap:

1. Most of us are a sad joke - but not you
2. Most of us have our heads in the sand - but not you
3. Most of us are pissing against the wind at the same time - but not you
4. Most of us are a real circus act - but not you
5. You can't wait until we have a legal remedy shoved down our throats - but you are pure as the driven snow.

Since water seeks its own level, why are you even here? This seems to be your modus operandi in nearly every post you make. You are not constructive, everyone is always wrong and you are always right and you like to belittle members instead of constructively disagreeing with them and sharing a well crafted response.  Immature is all I can say.