Flickr disables Pinterest pins on all copyrighted images | Hacker News Reader

Flickr disables Pinterest pins on all copyrighted images

venturebeat.com

78 pointsevo_965 comments

What? They disabled Pinterest on ALL images which are not in the public domain? Sheesh, might as well drop the feature altogether if you're going to disable it on 99.9% of content.

Oh, you mean they allowed copyright owners to disable Pinterest on their images. That makes more sense.

Sorry, it just gets my goose when people misuse the word "copyrighted" this way.

Here is how you pin blocked content to Pinterest in simple steps ;) http://blog.initlabs.com/post/18226946517/how-to-pin-blocked...

Flickr and Pinterest both have systems that allow copyright holders to specify what rights they wish to grant to others. Those two systems are now interoperable. Cool.

Agree. Isn't this the whole point of having a creative commons API on Flickr in the first place?

If we're going to start defining the CC license in this way, we really need one that's even more restrictive - i.e., all rights reserved, except social network sharing. The current CC non-commercial, non-derivative, attribution-required seems insufficient in comparison.

What surprises me most about CC-licensed work is how often the author/licensor neglects one aspect of the license:

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Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)

-------- [1]

Attribution in manner specified by the author or licensor. I can't remember a single time that I have seen anybody that uses CC specify in what manner they require attribution.

It would be quite simple to require reasonable attribution in a way that a user of pinterest can't do, and in that case use of the licensed work would be in conflict of the license used.

[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Facebook allows you to post pins to fb, but doesn't allow you to pin images that are fb. http://min.us/mbrREewTH7

It seems as though the pinning of a photo on flickr would give the artist more recognition.

Isn't that more helpful than hurtful?

Just checked... pinterest creates a copy of the medium-size image and stores it on their own servers. Users can view and re-pin it without seeing the context and author. Very surprising to me, and not cool.

Given that the alternative is effectively stealing bandwidth, which would you prefer?

Bandwidth stealing and giving credit to the photographer are not mutually exclusive.

It's a valid point, downvoters. I think that having to ask permission to link an image inline is pretty silly - the responsible thing to do would be to rehost it in some manner and then link the rehosted version.

Screwed if you do (accused of breaking "copyright"), screwed if you dont (accused of "stealing" bandwidth).

I guess you don't really believe in copyright if you're going to use scare quotes around it.

I guess I don't see how copyright applies to publicly viewable images online that are being used for non-commercial purposes. Certainly someone can link to that page, and anyone could see the image. It seems to come down to "credit", and there should be a link to the original content.

The internet is pretty much built around the idea of finding interesting things in other places online and then sharing that. In fact, Google made a very profitable business just following and index those links to other content. The point of pinterest is to share interesting visual pieces. So a textual link doesn't do as much as showing a thumbnail. But it's still the same basic concept. Just as blogs expose links to interesting articles, so too does pinterest expose interesting pictures. In both cases, if you like the original what you see, you should be able to visit the original author/creator's page to check out more.

I see this as about as reasonable as blocking links on a blog. Don't publish articles online if you don't want people to link to them. Don't publish photos online if you don't want people to link to them (or share smaller thumbnails). If someone takes your article/photo and claims credit for it, then you have a valid argument. But if someone's whole "crime" is to enjoy your content enough to share it and advertise for you, a "thank you" would be more appropriate than arguing that they're infringing your copyright.

The poster I responded to was talking about two seperate things:

1. Linking an image: Here no, copyright probably doesn't apply though attribution would be nice.

2. Copying an image to your server and serving a scaled version, or a complete duplicate of the original. Here copyright applies.

Copyright does apply (but only because they copy the image - even if a scaled version - to their servers and serve from there). Whether it should is a different issue.

Shouldn't Pinterest just be enabling some simple tech that also scrapes the attribution on CC licensed photos?

It's hard to believe, but there is quite a lot paranoid amateur and pro photogs worried that someone will steal their photo to a facebook page and somehow this way they'll lose millions of dollars and burry the chance to be the next Terry Richardson. And they are not Annie Leibovitz, those are dudes who care about their 'a shell on the beach' and 'sunset bridge' flicks.

No I think this is not the main reason. There are a bunch of people on Flickr who are interested in creating stuff and a social activity around that but are not interested in a culture that is about copying stuff that you like.

When I first asked a friend about Pinterest, his reply went more or less along the lines of "it lets users be creators and not just consumers."

I still don't know what he was smoking, but I don't think he's alone.

Maybe, but there is also a bunch of people who will dry hump publishing platforms hoping to get recognition and profits, yet they rage when they realize that not every person who has access to their content is the audience they're hoping for.

What happens if [Etsy, Amazon, Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger] blocks Pinterest and build pinboards into their own site?

Then that company would be an underdog in the pinboard business, with lost referrals (Etsy, Amazon) or a distraction from the core focus (WordPress, Blogger), and have to spend several years building a community of users who think to go to the new site to pin things. And other sites would presumably also block this upstart.

If pinning were just a technology feature Tumblr seems the closest to being able to duplicate it (their archive view seems vaguely close to a pinboard, minus the interactivity), but they would also have to provide users with a better alternative.

I don't get it, Pinterest is an enabler for photographers and artist. I never go to Flickr, could care less, but if I see something of interest on Pinterest (or any other sharing site), I would actually make the effort to go to Flickr and check it out. If I really like what I see from said artist/photographer, I would perhaps consider purchasing some of their work to display in my home. If not, by sharing what I saw, I potentially gave that artist a ton more eyeballs on their work, thus increasing their chances of people buying their artwork. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages of sharing IMHO

The benefits of share most likely do outweigh disadvantages for most people, most of the time. The whole point of putting photos on Flickr is that you can share them with other people. However, Flickr also gives its users the opportunity to specify access controls on their photos as well. Being able to control who sees, and who shares photos is another reason to use Flickr. As both an engineer and a photographer, I greatly prefer a system that puts its users in control, rather than forcing everyone into a single path that the designers believe is in their best interest.

"Illusion of control". It's more a way to tell the user that the photographer doesn't want it to be shared than an actual control.

To call linking to a copyrighted work piracy is a stretch.

Apparently, Pinboard copies the actual image to their servers and serves from there. Barring fair use or a license, it's copyright infringement.

All those resources and they use an alert()?

The alert is from the Pinterest bookmarklet.

Flickr respects the wishes of its users. So?

If they had gone the other way, the headline could be "Flickr allows stealing of artist work".

I'm not sure about all that.

They could easily respond to an article like "Flickr allows stealing of artist work" by adding "nopin" later.

However, I don't disagree with their intention. It is nice that they are considering the user in that way.

Maybe a better implementation would be for it to be a preference, rather than assuming. They could have an option like "prevent users from posting my photos to other websites".

They do have that option. The photos they are protecting have that option set. On their settings page:

http://www.flickr.com/account/privacy/

They have a setting that says "Allow others to share your stuff". If you have marked it No, it cannot be shared to Pinterest. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

> They could have an option like "prevent users from posting my photos to other websites".

(EDIT: Totally missed the "Allow others to share your stuff" option that spullara mentioned. I still think that feature should probably be wrapped hand-in-hand with CC, though.)

Flickr already has this in the CC licenses, which are already more specific options than that. (Anything in CC is "allow people to use this elsewhere" to some extent.)

Honestly, this could all be made better by making the CC licenses more prominent and making the descriptions much more human-readable (for the non technical, non startup-y crowd).

The CC tool at https://creativecommons.org/choose/ is really close, but the wording still a bit too close to legalese IMO. Perhaps:

* Let other people use my photos as long as they credit me. (Yes is locked in) * Let other people use my photos on products and websites where they make money. (Yes/No) * Let other people use this for collages, Photoshopped mashups, and other derivative works. (Yes/As long as they use the same open license for it/No)

(With some sort of live-updating "here is the license you have ended up with and here is what it means" bit.)

I’m not sure if the licensing stuff shows up in the Flickr registration process at all, but maybe a reminder in the (relatively spacious) sidebar every few logins would help folks choose the right thing.

I don't think the if it ain't broke don't fix it mentality is really appropriate for an innovative company. Flickr is simply giving its users the option to add a line of code Pinterest introduced that restricts how their work is used, which they are fully allowed to do. The title mis-represents the action.

This is stupid. Are we starting over again?

Just don't provide a high quality version if you are selling it. This kind of blocking is just annoying as any other DRM and will certainly be side-stepped by end users.

Blocking? This is just a gentleman's agreement to respect the author's wishes. Does Pinterest include attribution?

Agreed - if my images on flickr are set to NOT allow sharing, Flickr implementing solutions to prevent people from sharing these easily is a good thing. Attribution or not, if you've set your images to not allow sharing, sharing it expressly goes against the creators wishes.

Compare: google (or any third party) using tracking cookies when your settings say otherwise & expressly told your browser not to allow it.

Your rights as a content creator are limited by law, and it's unfair for content creators to use technical means to circumvent the public's right to their content.

(I say this as an author of one of those dead-tree things, and of much software. I'd like people to follow my license agreement, but some in some cases copyright law grants my users more rights than the license, and I respect that.)

I dunno if I agree with this. Yes, the public has rights to the content described and limited by law. No, there is no provision in the law that requires content creators to make copying easy, nor is there any provision preventing them from making it as difficult as they can.

Also, I doubt that all of Pinterest users' use cases are protected. Depending on the proportion, it might be more apt to say that these content owners are proactively protecting their content from unprotected uses, rather than resorting to the courts or DMCA.

Edit: wow, this is an incredibly contentious topic. Never seen this density of downvotes in a thread before.

> nor is there any provision preventing them from making it as difficult as they can

Whilst that might be accurate in the detail of the law, it appears to contain something basically malfunctional.

It seems to render the law effectively meaningless. If you are actually prevented from doing something, what has happened to your right to be allowed to? If there were public rights-of-way across someone's farmland, but they built walls around it, there would seem to be some kind of problem. (Or maybe a better example would be a visibility-cloaking device that made it look like there was a wall -- is that prevention, or just making things less easy? Does that make it OK?)

If the letter of the law supports the frustration of the intent of the law, something is wrong, surely.

I don't really think so. There are a lot of other laws like this. For example, you have the right, according to law, to take pictures of people in their homes, provided you stand on public ways and are not harassing them. When people pull the shutters, is that malfunctional?

There's also a difference between a positive right (the government protects your right to do something) and a negative one (the government will not prevent you from doing something). Fair use seems to be a negative right -- the government does not prevent you from using copyrighted works. But it doesn't require that copyright owners convey these works to you as conveniently as you want.

Yes, but what is the basic intent? It is to make/keep things reasonably available (in the constitution (USA) and/or the standard economic view) . . .

What additional rights do you believe they have here? If I understand rightly, pinning something is using an entire work under US copyright law, which makes it hard to claim fair use.

Are you implying that the public has a right to share content by law, regardless of the content creators wishes?

It does; it's called fair use.

Ah fair use is a defense in court, not something you can trot out in all situations before you get to court.

Secondly, consider the context... how are you going to argue that people have a fair use right to share copyrighted images with the public simply because they want to show what they 'like' on their pinboard?

Allowing that makes a loophole big enough to render pretty much any copyright protection of images null.

Fair use is as much a legal right as copyright protection itself; it's codified in 17 U.S.C. § 107. You don't have to argue before a judge before you can use a work without permission under the fair use doctrine -- thankfully.

A good portion of US law is the "meet these conditions or this protection doesn't apply" type; fair use is no different. We don't go around telling people "don't run user-generated content sites, the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA is just a defense in court".

What I'm trying to get at is that every provision concerning fair use is murky, and has to withstand argument in court. Every part of a fair use claim is subject to 'judgement' rather than merely establishing factual claims.

The law doesn't provide any real guidance as what constitutes a fair use work, only that somethings do count as fair use and in court we'll decide which do.

Determining fair use is a complicated, fact-specific analysis and even lawyers will have a hard time predicting if a case will win under a fair use claim.

Lots of things are items 'to be decided in court', but the preponderance of prior cases, and the strictness of the law makes it pretty clear if an argument is going to be successful or unsuccessful. Fair Use doesn't really provide that.

Edit: I started this discussion on the wrong foot... we're talking about how the laws apply globally, but my intention was to remark about Pinterest and Pinterest users only.

>and the strictness of the law makes it pretty clear if an argument is going to be successful or unsuccessful. Fair Use doesn't really provide that.

You can say the same thing about copyright law - both are provided for and are explicitly provided, and both are a matter of judgement.

Here's the thing: As provided in the law, fair use and copyright are on equal footing. One does not carry more weight than the other. Both "rights" exist. You can copyright something, but that does not strip other parties of their fair use rights.

I think copyright is clear cut, and fair use is not.

I guess you disagree.

The problem is that it's as pointless to disallow using a pinterest extension as it is to intercept right-clicks. Anyone can still capture/copy the image and share it trough other means. That's the reason photographers' websites seldomly feature hi-res images and plaster watermarks all over.

Pinterest might be doing attribution wrong (I don't know, I don't use it), but this doesn't fix it. Nothing stops me from taking a screenshot of a Flickr page and sharing it on twitter. Isn't that fair use? Anyone can see the same page already. Pinterest just became a tool that annoys you because of other people's paranoia with copyright infringement, just like a DVD player that only read Zone 4 discs, the iPod disallowing grabbing songs from it, or the aforementioned right-click popup saying "This content is copyrighted". It's stupid. I can't believe how different the attitude is here in contrast to other stories on music and DRM, it's like a totally different crowd.

It's unrealistic to expect EverNote, pinboard and every other software that clips web comtent to "respect wishes". Should audio recorders listen for signatures that disallow the recording of copyrighted audio? Cameras refusing to take pictures inside art venues (I've heard that one)? I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in that world.

I just pinned a bunch of my own images today. Flickr, don't tell me what I can and can't do with content I created myself.

Then CC-license your content with the most restrictive CC version (non commercial, no derivative works, attribution required). That’s essentially what Pinterest's "anyone can repost anything that anyone has posted" sharing style is, anyway.

What if I’m a professional photographer who doesn’t want my photos re-posted everywhere to, in essence, help Pinterest gain users make money? (Rhetorical, by the way; not a pro photographer and most of my photos are under the least restrictive CC-BY license. I personally think photographers could stand to get a lot more exposure via Pinterest.)

How do you expect Flickr to differentiate from you and someone else who wants to rip off your content?

Depending on how the work is split between the pinterest bookmarklet and the pinterest server, it is possible that Flickr would just have to omit the <meta> tag for my own photo pages if I'm logged in.

> How do you expect Flickr to differentiate from you and someone else who wants to rip off your content?

Any photographer or artist who really doesn't want their images shared should not make them available on the internet. Period. Given the capabilities of current computing platforms, there exists no method by which you can restrict redistribution.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Er... just because you can't prevent something by technical means, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to prevent it by social means.

For example: There's no technical way I can prevent you from slandering me, short of preventing all of your speech. However if you do slander me, and I find out about it then I can take you to court.

The nopin setting just enforces a gentlemans agreement between Pinterest and the site in question. If the Pinterest user really wants to share that picture, all they have to do is copy the link and do it manually.

This is a good point. If you don't want your photos seen by others, don't put them on Flickr. If you want to sell highres versions of your photos, only put lowres versions up. So long as things are properly attributed and only low-quality images are stored/used, I see this as Fair Use.

How do they currently do it outside of Pinterest? They don't.

Flickr makes an effort to spell out to visitors the terms of your image's copyright (whatever they may be), as a photographer that's where their responsibility ends, and I'm ok with that. I do not expect Flickr to slap DRM on it on my behalf and go out of its way to prevent the inevitable.

If someone wants to throw my photos on imgur and share them without attribution, there's not a lick of anything I can do about it, Pinterest or otherwise. Flickr has done its due diligence informing users about the legalities of whatever use they have in mind, and that's fine.

Also, when I hit the Pinterest bookmarklet, I am logged into Flickr, and staring at one of its own pages. Flickr knows exactly who I am - the same logic that's locking out Pinterest could just as well check if I have permissions to share these images.

With cookies, this wouldn't be that hard. I wouldn't be surprised if they ultimately let people pin their own content regardless of their settings.

I wouldn't, if I was making that decision. I can see too many users changing the setting to disable sharing, testing it and then claiming Flickr is "broken" (or worse). And rumors like that easily spread and are hard to disprove.

As you have little trouble hotlinking your images off of Flickr servers to your own site (without Flickr's required attribution), can't you just pin the direct JPG URL?

Looks like the Hollywood war on the Silicon Valley is gaining steam. We are a large chat/IM provider, not directly involved in any copyright-able content and the last 5-6 months have been exceptionally hard in the amount of bullying from MPAA and the likes because of their complaints about LINKS and other things- often plain text where users just talk about copyrighted materials!

What does Flickr have to do with Hollywood? They are using a method Pinterest provides so that people can't pin copyrighted content. A feature users who own copyrighted content most likely are happy they implemented.

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