Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 93po | Hacker News Reader

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I am frustrated by pinterest because I often use google image search to not only find an image, but to find information behind it. For example I was looking for images of camper van builds - if I saw a particular photo of a camper van interior, I want to know more information about something I see in it or possibly more photos from the same build. The photo on pinterest clearly did not originate on pinterest, it's taken from elsewhere on the internet (probably violating the copyright holder's rights in the process) and doesn't link back to the source in any way. So I'm left with pages full of images that don't help me in any way because they're scraped from other sites and pushed potentially relevant results to the background of search results. The whole process is just frustrating, and to me that's why pinterest has made the internet worse.

Also dismissing the nag screen as "not a problem for most people" completely omits the fact that it's still horribly annoying and continues to show constantly even when i've dismissed it a thousand times in my life. i'm not going to reward crappy behavior and clogging search results by registering for your site, and even if i did, i don't want to have to log in on a million devices and any time i use someone else's computer to avoid seeing it again

I think there’s some confusion with how the product works:

The images are scraped on behalf of user request along with relevant information from the originating webpage. The goal is that all pins on Pinterest are actionable (in nearly all cases, linking to the original webpage). The most often cause of missing links is for a website to go offline. In those cases, would you rather your Google image search return no results or for a cached image on Pinterest with a link to the original website which can be used for further digging.

> (probably violating the copyright holder’s rights in the process)

No, that’s not what is happening at all here.

If someone takes a photo I own and post on my website and reposts it to pinterest, yes that is violating my copyright.

I’m from the US and so I can only speak to US law which I’m more familiar with and obligatory IANAL but… counterintuitively that is only _possibly_ infringement. More information would be needed to determine exactly if that is infringing.

Pinterest, like most sites hosting UGC is protected under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c) DMCA safe harbor laws.

The majority of pins on Pinterest are from the “pin-it button” a small snippet of JavaScript which content creators embed themselves on websites. Pinterest offers opt-out mechanisms but the majority of content creators see huge value in the additional traffic generated from Pinterest.

Pinterest is not legally liable for the copyright infringement, but they're still facilitating it and making a ton of money off of it. It doesn't make it any more right.

You're right it's only "possibly" infringement - there are cases where it wouldn't be (fair use) but the default is that generally speaking, it is, and I would be surprised if more than half the content on pinterest was there legally and with consent of the copyright owner.

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