Hacker News Reader

Comment by newman314 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

> 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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com