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Meta name="pinterest" content="nopin"

blog.pinterest.com

83 pointsfranze73 comments

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It seems pretty obvious that Pinterest wouldn't qualify for safe harbor under the DMCA.

> Direct Financial Benefit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...

The entire service is reliant on the ability of users to "pin" copyrighted images from across the web.

> Knowledge of Infringing Material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...

Anyone with any objectivity can see that 99% of the images on Pinterest are being used without permission.

It also seems that Pinterest themselves are "uploading" all the images to their servers. Users just tell Pinterest which images to take. Technically it would be no different if YouTube were to store/serve Netflix videos after a user "pinned" them.

I disagree. Pinterest would certainly qualify for safe harbor due to the "Automated upload mechanism". Meaning they have no manual or editorial review process. Users simply click and it happens through code. That's the biggest distinction.

Yep. I don't see how it's any different from someone uploading a copyrighted video to youtube...

Did you miss the part where users don't actually do the uploading? Just a minor point, but potentially important.

They're both essentially a single button click. Technically, there is a difference. Realistically, there isn't.

I personally know one company which lost a court case based on that defense. Not in US/under DMCA, though.

I think it's a sad state of affairs when people are using a site to show other people their favorite stuff and are technically breaking the law by doing so.

But you can understand the scrapbook motivation though can't you?

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Ignoring the legalities - the motivation is that people like to collect and share things of interest.

Sites like pinterest are probably more alluring and easier to use than compiling and sharing a list of URLs with your friends.

I don't know. If we are talking about artistic work, it'd probably be fine with the proper attribution, but if it's a recipe, that's the entire content with no additional point of visiting the original page.

Then again, this is in no way different than Tumblr, which is the most egregious copyright offender, even within its own ranks because of the reblog feature. Recently, the actress Dianna Agron - known from TV show Glee - launched her own website http://youmeandcharlie.com, which does - and encourages - the same thing. And it's building a profitable business on this model, meaning that the people behind the site earn money based on this approach; it's one thing to have a random Tumblr account with no financial incentive, but this is different.

The biggest problem is that we suck at teaching people and our children the importance of proper attribution, and why it is important that we do our best to tie the author together with the work. I don't know if this requires a taboo or campaign, but with services like imgur and Tumblr, it's only going to become a bigger problem - and that's not to discuss how the majority of reporters don't get the point of sourcing either.

I think an ad-hoc approach to dealing with DMCAs - and possible blocking specific content hashes - is the only way to do it for Pinterest. Anything else hurts Pinterest as much as the content owners and shops.

It seems to me the biggest issue with these sites activity is when they replace a user's desire/need to visit the content creator's site. It's no longer collecting URLs or sharing favorite things -- it's recompiling copyrighted work into a new work and leaving out the original content creators. It seems that's the infringement (at least in my gut).

What if, instead, Pinterest were to behave more like google images and provide only thumbnails. Where to see that "12 uses for baking soda" you had to click through to the blogger's site? Could that preserve the service and the community, but protect content creators as well?

There is certainly an experience trade off here. Discussion is less likely to occur on Pinterest, the user may have no further reason to go to that blog -- they only wanted to see the list. These sites might not be able to handle the traffic...and on and on.

But it would seem you'd be closer to sharing your favorite things while not taking advantage of copyrighted material (possibly even being more legal about it), and often providing a marginally better experience. As a user I've now discovered this blog not just the uses for baking soda. For pins where the image wasn't enough, I didn't have to deal with the second click.

Trade offs trade offs trade offs...

>The entire service is reliant on the ability of users to "pin" copyrighted images from across the web.

I'm not so sure. The service is reliant on the ability of its users to "pin" content which, from what I can tell, is represented by images. I could be wrong, though.

>Anyone with any objectivity can see that 99% of the images on Pinterest are being used without permission.

However, it was "pinned" by its users, not the site administrators, so I believe it would qualify the same way imgur qualifies despite it being a massive pool of copyright infringement. But IANAL.

Well how does facebook deal with it?

And what about Google Images? Don't you think that 99% of the images on Google Images are being used without permission? I know I've never received a request from Google pertinent to indexing my images, automatically uploading/hosting them to their own server, etc.

You don't see the difference?

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1637143363405832...

Google images has been litigated and the result is incredibly pertinent to this discussion. Check out the section on fair use...

"(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

And in addition, the court considered what the service was offering to the public. They seem pretty concerned about the fact google never deals with the full sized images... etc. etc.

The whole case seems pretty relevant. It includes discussions on the other types of infringement as well including material contribution.

I would hate to have to add a meta tag for each services...

  meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex"
  meta name="facebook" content="nolike"
  meta name="tumblr" content="noreblog"
  meta name="twitter" content="noretweet"
  ...

That's the first thing I thought of when reading the article.

You can't expect each website owner to know every online service available on the web!

What's a better way to deal with this then? Embedding copyright notices into your images? Having a COPYRIGHT.TXT file?

> What's a better way to deal with this then?

Having lots of fanged, slavering lawyers straining at their leashes, ready to be turned loose. It works for Disney:-)

Some extension of the ideas in robots.txt could help.

I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. Pinterest might be a "hot" startup but it's still a gnat in realm of business. Yet I'm seeing reports praising Pinterest for being proactive.

The onus is upon Pinterest not to violate copyright and not for sources to have to add a metadata tag to adapt to some startup's business model. This does not address the situation where an image comes from a service which does not currently allow you to set the tag (say Flickr) nor does it address what someone has to do when another startup with a different model comes along.

> still a gnat in realm of business

That hasn't been my experience on several modest content sites. Across the board Pinterest sends more traffic than Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.

totally depends on the site

http://www.thefancy.com/, http://weheartit.com/, http://ffffound.com/

There are hundreds of sites like Pinterest. It's fundamentally how the internet works. A free exchange of information. If you don't want your copyrighted content on Pinterest, file a DMCA notice.

imgur.com has more traffic (even more traffic than reddit) and almost no way to attribute content, yet no one is crying foul; all while imgur brings in significant amounts of money for other people's content. I don't see the difference.

To take the nonsense further... Reddit makes tons of money providing links to other people's content (usually linked through imgur with no attribution). Google makes billions off advertising against other people's content, search results and copyrighted images. Where do you draw the line in the nonsense?

If that approach had been followed - onus on the company - there could have been no such thing as search engines on the scale of Google or Bing. Unless you like your search engine with a few million pages instead of a trillion.

Much of the foundation of the content Web rests on the notion of asking forgiveness later (so to speak), rather than permission first.

google obeys the

  <meta name="robots" content="noimageindex"> 

  - or -

  <meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex">

meta tag. well, i guess pinterest didn't knew about it and instead reinvented - an unknown, obscure, niche - wheel, again. (see: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...)

Yeah, but this way they get to write a blogpost that's basically...

"So do you guys know how popular we are? SO popular."

But they get to do it under the cover of being both helpful and community-minded. It's clever.

Showing up in an image index (generated by crawlers) is different enough from showing up on Pinterest (curated by humans) that allowing one to make the choices independently is totally reasonable.

it's a stretchy argument, but one i'm going make anyway: before the crawl, there is discovery. discovery is the process of knowing all the URLs to pass to the crawler.

discovery is fueled by

  * links
  * sitemap.xml

who creates links (and sitemaps)? humans (either editorially or programmatically, but at some point humans were involved in the link creation process)

defining the pinterest fetching process as "not indexing" or "not crawling" seems a little bit unfair against your friendly neighborhood googlebot.

also if pinterest is "currated by humans" then the pin-tag would be unnecessary. a simple plain text "DO NOT PIN THIS" message in the article/product/image/.. (whatever people pin these days) description would be sufficient.

Well at least they should honor that too since clearly the owner does not want their photos discoverable ( plus by crossing over to pinterest they become indexable, right?)

what's next? meta name="browser" content="nolink" to not allow deep linking? or linking at all? this is stupid.

Of course you can still open an image directly and pin that.

Why a company would not want their product image and a link back to their site is beyond me (it's basically free advertising).

>Of course you can still open an image directly and pin that

well, to counter this scenario pinterest would need to support the

  X-Pinterest-Tag: nopin

HTTP header - for images, PDF, all non HTML data (similar to googles "standard" X-Robots-Meta: noimageindex, see: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index...)

As a side note, you are not supposed to use X- anymore. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3539663

That is still a draft document, and has not been accepted as a BCP (Best Current Practice) RFC yet.

Or the more generic

    X-Allow-Repost: no

But why don't they just look at EXIF data for copyright/license and respect that?

because that's expensive and time consuming.

"It took too long to check, so I violated your copyright." ?

I guess the real reason is that the EXIF data has the typical metadata problem: its not accurate at all.

I'm concerned this will lead to a number of meta-tags we will have to include in our ever-growing header tags. Can Pinterest and Facebook not just acknowledge robots.txt or we invent a new tag like rel=nofollow?

robots.txt is for web crawlers that follow links, it doesn't usually apply to robots that fetch a single page based on a user request. But they could invent and adopt a new tag.

Surely the proper place for this is robots.txt, maybe using something similar to Google Images:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Requiring sites to update their html seems overtly obnoxious (or maybe just thoughtless!).

I was amazed at how quickly Facebook's og meta tags were adopted by many sites back in the day; I used to run an archiving/scraping service and it helped me a lot.

I can't help but think Pinterest should also offer a meta tag for sites that want um, Pin... interest. Something beyond og:image.

What they really should do instead is either use the Open Graph tags or some other kind of meta tags (if absolutely necessary) to ensure proper attribution.

Then, they could take it a step further and use perceptual hashing to compare images and make sure the original source gets the credit.

Do they copy the images, or hotlink them? If they hotlink, some evil minds might come up with other "workarounds".

No way I am going to add some meta tag just for pinterest. Not that I have anything I don't want to be shared yet, but still.

As noted by a comment on the page, it would be better if they had a more generic meta name value so that content creators don't have to do the same for every website that they don't want their content distributed to.

This is a smart move. It's much easier to tag your site than issue a takedown request.

I mean, it probably won't stop copyright infringement too much , but it gives Pinterest something to point to when people complain.

Why, though, is it opt out rather than opt in? Given the claimed advantages of pinterest participation, why not have those sites that want to participate add the meta tag? It seems somewhat backwards to demand that sites that don't want to participate add a meta tag for a single, specific site.

EDIT: One interesting side effect of moderation on sites like this is that it actively discourages conversation. I've replied to various questions and, without fail, when someone asserts their opinion by downvoting this, they need to seek out and downvote every other post I've made on this topic. Weak sauce.

You're joking, right? The overwhelming majority of sites either don't care or are positive towards stuff like Pinterest (more ad eyeballs, for example). It's the rarity to [i]not[/i] want to be shareable.

No, I'm not "joking". The default license for content without an explicit license is that it is copyrighted. There are existing tags for looser licensing (e.g. creative commons). This is an obnoxious demand, and the "we decide whether it benefits you, and thus determine how we violate your rights" is a garbage way to proceed. No kidding it serves pinterest, though.

Do you think Google Image Search is bad, too? If not, what's the relevant difference?

ever heard of "fair use"?

So you're saying Pinterest only copy US created content to their servers?

Yup, I have. And saying "fair use" makes about as much sense as saying "abracadabra" -- it's an incredibly narrow set of criteria that you can use if you're actually in court, not a magic word you can utter to make things work to your advantage.

It's like saying being indexed by Google should be opt-in.

A relatively tiny site is demanding a site-specific meta tag for them to not commercial benefit by violating your copyright. Google, in contrast, observes long existing, cross-industry tags and behaviors.

And Google is hardly the example counterpoint: Many of its activities do border on very questionable. In Google's ideal world you never leave Google.com as they're filtered everyone else's content down to everything you need.

Why? Because this is the internet. I shouldn't have to ask permission every time I want to create a hyperlink.

It has nothing to do with creating a hyperlink. It has to do with misappropriating copyrighted content for commercial purposes.

Rephrase, Everyone on the internet shouldn't have to ask permission when they want to create a hyperlink on a public site.

It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.

>It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.

More likely than not, hotlinking. Also, lawyers ruin everything.

Pinterest is downloading images from other sites and hosting it on their own servers. No one is complaining about linking or even hotlinking.

pinboard, del.icio.us, ... (if other bookmarking sites still exist, please add here) is downloading title-text from other sites and hosting it on their own servers. what's the difference?

It seems reasonable to me that taking meta-data would fall under fair-use but taking the actual media wouldn't.

For example: Scraping <title> tags off Netflix would be legit, but copying Netflix video files wouldn't.

The difference being that pictures are commonly inserted inline in the web for discussion/humour/other purposes more than video. When a video is inserted in a page, more often than not it's the focus of the page.

I always thought of rehosting images as the courteous thing to do. Say someone made an image macro that you want to insert inline into a post on a board somewhere. Depending on the popularity of the forum, hotlinking it could suck up their bandwidth allotment and get their site knocked offline. The nice thing to do would be then to rehost it (using Imgur or the like) and link it that way.

Well, Facebook not only takes parts of text, but also displays thumbnails of actual image content of the linked site.

Thumbnails and excerpts are pretty clearly fair use. Especially when you are trying to encourage the market for the copyrighted work.

Couldn't that be considered caching? Wouldn't people be upset if they were hotlinking?

They're putting it on the Web. Traditionally, there is assumed to be a certain degree of permission involved in putting content on the Web unless you specifically indicate otherwise. If we don't assume this permission, Web browsers would be just as bad, since they download and cache your copyrighted content.

(Note to downvoters: If you believe I'm wrong, a response would do a better job of correcting the misinformation. If you believe I'm posting this is bad faith, you're mistaken. I really don't see how the Web can coexist with the assumption "A program may not download resources offered by a webserver without explicit opt-in permission.")

I completely agree with you. Opt-in means nothing would ever be done in this world, because everyone would be wasting resources on getting permissions. No browsers, no search engines, no Wikipedia, no HN, no nothing.

The rule of thumb should be: you opt-in when you put your stuff on the Internet.

How about <meta name="pinterest" content="dopin" />? Why would I want to put additional crap on my site if I wanted to opt out of this? An opt-in would be much better.

Because then you'd have to opt-in to Google Images, Reddit, HN, and a thousans other services as well, which of course you won't do, because it's a waste of time. Opt-in is not a way to go if you want to have anything done in the world.

Isn't this

[meta name="pinterest" content="don't infringe my copyright"]

???

When will the IP madness stop?

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