Pinterest, ladysplained.

[Janet]

There's been some talk about the license thing on the library listservs, according to my coworker. She posted instructions on how to properly pin to a permanent image from our catalog and now librarians are worried they can get sued. I did copy and upload an image for one of our pins because the original was a PDF and wouldn't pin. If the state of Michigan wants to sue a library for posting their district map, I say go ahead. It will only waste money and get them bad press anyway.

[LadyShea]

District maps are sorta public records aren't they?

I don't think there is anymore problem with IP rights on Pinterest than there is for the rest of the web...fair use still applies (and a library using materials to educate and inform is fair use, right?) and you can attribute in your description.

[LadyShea]

Okay Interesting. I repinned a cute scavenger hunt for little kids while traveling in the car. Then I went looking for more car games and found MomsMinivan.com - 101 Road Trip Games, Car Travel Games for Kids, and Games to Play in the Car, Printable Car Trip Games (MMV).

The scavenger hunt I Pinned was from a blog. That blogger apparently took the MMV hunt and made minor changes.

So, is this theft of IP by me since I know about it? The original is not Pinnable because she has her images protected on her site, should I use the blogger guy's image and leave it linking to his blog, or leave the image but link to MMV? Remove the Pin? Leave the pin as is (linked to his blog), but link to MMV also in the description?

Here is the original Printable Scavenger Hunt Car Game for Preschool kids

Here is the bloggers
http://abcphoneticblog.com/wp-conten...enger-hunt.jpg

[LadyShea]

[LadyShea]

Jumping to Demi's aspirations idea. A few years back at some kind of business function, I remember a motivational speaker talking about creating a "goals" board, and pinning things like trips you want to take, places you want to live, things you want to own, maybe pics of babies or old people or dogs or whatever you want in your life etc. up there, just as a visual reminder of what you are working toward. When you get something, you should leave it up there with a big check mark or "Done" or "accomplished" on it

Also, I remember reading about it in a self help book too, that you should always have a set of reachable goals for yourself as well as a set of shared goals with your partner or kids or whatever, and to somehow mark or especially acknowledge the accomplishing of the things, even small ones. And that made a lot of sense, and I've always kind of kept a list, and even had a dream vacation on my refrigerator for a few years (it turned out to be really unattainable and became depressing so I threw it away)

Because really, it's not the thought of doing laundry on Saturday that keeps me going. Pinterest is like that goals list.

[Demimonde]

Leave the pin as is (linked to his blog), but link to MMV also in the description?

That is what I would recommend. The blogger appropriated another's work, and you uncovered that. In terms of the initial pinning which will create traffic on /all as well as in any of your followers feeds, the promotion has already happened and it is too late. For future people who may look at your board, or for any followers who want to go back to use that, I think a text update with the link would be more useful to the original blogger, and more obvious. That also should cover you.

I think of it like buying a stolen bike at a garage sale. You bought the bike in good faith thinking it belonged to the seller. If later you discover it was stolen, you should take the steps to return it to the original owner. Failing that, ride the bike you paid for.

[LadyShea]

It's such as stupid thing to steal too.

[Ensign Steve]

Hey, do you know about tineye? (I am determined to find one fucking thing Tinkerbell hasn't already!)

If you have an image and you don't know where it came from, you can paste the address into tineye.com and it will try to find others like it on the web.

[LadyShea]

I don't know about that! I don't even understand it from your description!

More ladysplaining please.

[Ensign Steve]

Okay, suppose you see a picture on Pinterest that points to some crazy bootleg chinese blog or something, and you want to find the original blog it belongs to.

You point your webotron to this here url-a-jig: TinEye Reverse Image Search and then paste the address of the image into the search bar.

It will look for that image on the web and show you other websites that have the same or similar image. It's also good for finding higher-res versions of things, or originals of things that have been stolen and then watermarked by the thief! The fucking nerve.

[LadyShea]

Very cool. I could have used that with the hairy shoes, because the original Pin linked to some discussion board in another language and I had to image search and wade through all the barefoot running shoes that do not look like hairy human feet. But, I did the work because I wanted that Pin, for lisarea to not get called sweetie

[lisarea]

I will say "thank you" to you here, but I cannot even play like I "like" those shoes.

I almost died from seeing that.

[LadyShea]

I am kinda thinking it's a shoop, but the horribleness was worth a PIN to me

[LadyShea]

You want I should take it down so as to prevent possible death?

[lisarea]

No, I think I'm inoculated against death from grotesque foot-shoes now.

[LadyShea]

There's lace up ones too, would you prefer those?

[lisarea]

No, that's OK. I will just picture your lace up Ed Gein shoes in my mind.

[freemonkey]

uh, oh... copyright issues.

Originally Posted by blogger on Pinterest's TOS

By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.

In the following paragraph, Pinterest asks me, the user to affirm that, ...

... you represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Cold Brew Labs the rights in such Member Content, as contemplated under these Terms.

[LadyShea]

The solution to that guy's problem seemed pretty simple and obvious to me. Don't upload images to Pinterest, upload images you own to your own copyrighted site and then simply link to them from Pinterest, and/or link to public sites which maintain their copyright.

Is anybody here downloading images from the web, then turning around and uploading them to Pinterest?

[lisarea]

Pinterest automatically uploads the images you link to. It wouldn't work at all if it were hotlinking all the images from different sites. That would be horribly slow and site owners would get pissed off at the hotlinking and replace the images with other stuff. You know the stuff I'm talking about.

The only solution is that Pinterest really does need to change that policy. It's in pretty direct contradiction of their etiquette guidelines, too, where they discourage linking to a bunch of your own stuff.

[LadyShea]

I am still a bit confused I guess.

Unless you're rick rolling, the image should be clickable through to the original content...that's how it mostly works. When done this way, it is always a single picture, usually with some commentary or review or recommendation. So, does that not constitute fair use anyway?

[LadyShea]

From the Pinterest site, for those claiming infringement:

Include both of the following statements in the body of the Notice: "I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material or reference or link to such material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use)." "I hereby state that the information in this Notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the copyright or of an exclusive right under the copyright that is allegedly infringed."

[lisarea]

The thing that makes it iffy is Pinterest's user agreement, which says that by linking to an image, you represent yourself as the legal owner of that content and grant Pinterest a "a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license" to it.

But then, if you look at their Pin Etiquette guidelines, they say:

Avoid Self Promotion
Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.

And that pretty clearly indicates that they do not expect you to limit yourself to pinning your own content, and in fact, they discourage it.

So basically, pretty much everyone who uses Pinterest is violating the terms of the user agreement, and Pinterest knows and encourages that. I suspect that, with the conflicting messages, individual users wouldn't be held solely responsible for copyright violations, but I don't know.

The whole thing works just fine if they get rid of those sections of the user agreement freemonkey quoted, though.

[LadyShea]

Yeah the user agreement is badly worded.

I have just been reading up on fair use, and can't find any way that any of my Pins wouldn't fall under it.

[seebs]

The problem with fair use is mostly that it's not an unambiguous set of rules; courts are allowed to look at multiple factors and decide what they think is "fair". So there's no simple rules like "if it's not for profit, it is definitely fair use" or "if it's for profit, it's definitely not fair use". It's just that for-profit use "weighs against" a finding of fair use. Ultimately it's a judgement call, so until you have it in front of a judge, no one really knows with certainty...