Pinterest, We Have a Problem
whatblag.com
whatblag.com
30%+ of its images are flickr images...
... 99%+ of which are "All Rights Reserved".
How many
... page views,
... new subscribers,
... and $$$
have the most-pinned flickr images generated for pinterest, with the author not seeing a single cent... not even having the satisfaction of seeing their popularity on pinterest reflect in their flickr stats?
And: Pinterest does not even have the decency to display the author name and license info next to the image.
Pinterest's business model is flawed; it is based on systematic violation of copyright. At some point, someone will start a class-action lawsuit and invite flickr photographers whose works got "pinned" to sign up, to reclaim part of that >$200 million pie.
In fact, this seems like a valid startup idea to me: Create a one-page website explaining to flickr users what has been going on. Do a systematic reverse image search to find out which authors have been affected and invite them to join. Arrange with an interested lawfirm to get a % of their fee in exchange for delivering the list of potential plaintiffs.
At best, some photographs have a "request to license" link that bounces you to a third party (typically Getty Images) which offers to "Review the photo to determine if it's a good fit for licensing through us; Contact the photographer; Handle the details like releases and pricing" and takes "between two and seven days to arrange licensing." with prices typically around $100 for usable resolution for a postcard.
At worst, you have to sign in to Yahoo so that you can send the photographer a message about wanting to use their photo. You may or may not get a reply, and you have to arrange how to pay the photographer, if at all.
This may make sense for images which are to be used in a commercial context, but for personal use like how I wanted to use the images, it's way too expensive and much too much friction.
The vast majority of images will never be used commercially. There should be an easier way to remunerate the photographer, and at more reasonable prices. A "Pix Store" if you will. Maybe that's what the stock photo sites are supposed to be, but they don't have nearly the inventory.
Sorry for the tangent.
That's why Flickr lets you search for Creative Commons images, for which the photographer gives you that personal use permission in advance.
I find it covers all the shades of commerciality I've considered. Meanwhile, for a purely commercial photographer, the getty images option is there, and those won't come up in the Creative Commons search unless licensed appropriately.
The CC search tool on Flickr is a fantastic tool for finding photos of the exact "shade" of use you're looking for.
e.g., go search Flickr for "drawdy falls". No results in Getty, no results in the Commons, but a handful of images from photographers that are retaining full copyright, but have't posted contact info. Maybe they don't want compensation and just failed to select CC when they posted. Who knows. Regardless, many of the images I found were in this middle ground. I'm not trying to sound entitled here, just pointing out that there's lots of images that sadly cannot be used.
Is the up-to-a-week wait partly a consequence of GI giving the photog a chance to approve/deny the request? That would be reasonable -- they might not want, for example, a Neo-Nazi group licensing their photo of blonde, blue-eyed kids for some sort of racist poster campaign.
Also, $100 licensing for a photo that you really love is cheap as chips.
By personal use, do you mean that you were literally going to produce one copy of each postcard and keep them all yourself? You weren't going to make multiple copies and give/send any to anyone else?
Having to wait a week for each image, and pay $100 each, wasn't going to work.
For personal use such as this it'd be nice if there were an easier way. Maybe Flickr could even be the middle man and take a 30% cut.
Getty is clearly defaulting to "I want to use this image in an advertisement" or similar uses, NOT a one-off single print of an image, to be "displayed" to a single person audience. $100 per image is ridiculous for that.
does anybody know of a site that allows this?
Just because the photographer has one image for sale, it does not mean he is selling (or giving you the rights to distribute/copy) another image.
However, to be even more fair, the burden was on Flickr to implement this, not Pinterest. Pinterest is still encouraging copyright violation.
Legally (IANAL but my understanding is), Pinterest only needs to comply with DMCA takedown requests. Instead they are being proactive and allow people to tag images as "nopin", vastly reducing the need for tedious or unreliable monitoring of Pinterest for copyrighted content, as content owners must do for almost every other sharing site. That's a good thing, and they should be applauded for it.
I suspect you might dislike the opt-out vs. opt-in nature of the nopin system, but new technologies have been accused of facilitating the death of copyright ever since the invention of the radio, but it turned out that most of those inventions created a lot of value for the world and for creators who adapt to the new medium.
That didn't work out so well for MegaUpload.
But then again, pinterest probably doesn't have a strong lobby working against it.
I don't think you've taken a look around the internet. Many successes are dependent on breaking or at least challenging the outdated concept of copyright, and many further successes were simply the latest new thing that incrementally improved the copyright situation (basically every music startup from Napster to Spotify). Even search engines (or ESPECIALLY search engines) are in a deeply gray area of copyright law and have never fully challenged the fuzziness of copyright law.
And maybe it's worth considering how much value is gained by everyone if there are weaker copyright restrictions and punishments.
In Pinterest's case, they could always make their system load the images directly from the source website. I'm sure they considered that and rejected it because it would make everything much slower and cause issues when sites go down or switch images, but that's precisely what Google Images does when you click on a thumbnail. What's the real difference here?
30%+ of its images are flickr images...
First, I see no issue with their Terms of Service. That language is 100% cover-your-ass boilerplate, and any site that allows people to upload content will have a similar clause in their ToS. Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. all do.
See, e.g., section 6.C of YouTube's ToS: http://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms
If you find people are sharing your copyrighted material on Pinterest you should file a DMCA claim with them. That's how the mechanism is designed to work, for better or worse.
Second, when you react viscerally to what Pinterest is doing or enabling, think carefully about your opinion of YouTube. With respect to content, is there a substantive difference between these early days of Pinterest and the early days of YouTube?
The MPAA is probably saying, "See? You don't like it when it happens to you, either."
The significant issue here is the idea that the intended primary use for Pinterest may infringe on the rights of others. This is what took down Napster, and, to me, indemnifying Pintereist is too risky at this point.
It's my understanding that Pinterest is attempting to move to licensed and sponsored pins and they haven't annoyed any large industry groups and might even fare better legally than YouTube did. Who knows.
But the outrage, outrage, OUTRAGE at Pinterest over this clause here just tells me people are ignorant of (1) what this clause really means and (2) how many times they've agreed to it in the past.
It's 100% nerdrage in my opinion, and a month from now nobody will be talking about it.
I'm sure Pinterest makes you check a box saying you agree to the Terms of Use before they let you create an account.
Whether that's sufficient is up to a court to decide, and an attorney could tell you the likelihood of a successful suit given a specific fact pattern.
I'm not an attorney, though.
As I said below, people -- engineers, especially -- get caught up in contractual technicalities. The fundamental question is: do you trust Pinterest to do right by you?
Flickr has a similar clause that every photographer who has uploaded their photos has agreed to, but they do right by their users and so nobody believes one day Flickr is going to undo all that work. It would alienate their customers.
If you think Pinterest is untrustworthy, why do you think some text on a screen that they wrote themselves is going to impact their behavior one way or another?
> Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Yahoo! Services. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:
> With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Yahoo! Services and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Yahoo! Services.
The key here is “solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available.” Pinterest’s ToS doesn’t have such language.
Additionally, Yahoo’s ToS doesn’t indemnify Yahoo against all possible liability or force their legal bills w/r/t copyright claims &c. onto users. The relevant language is much more constrained:
> You agree that Yahoo! has no responsibility or liability for the deletion or failure to store any messages and other communications or other Content maintained or transmitted by the Yahoo! Services. You acknowledge that Yahoo! reserves the right to log off accounts that are inactive for an extended period of time.
"You agree to indemnify and hold Yahoo! and its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, employees, partners and licensors harmless from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of Content you submit, post, transmit, modify or otherwise make available through the Yahoo! Services, your use of the Yahoo! Services, your connection to the Yahoo! Services, your violation of the TOS, or your violation of any rights of another."
Absolutely any and every product you use has ridiculous Terms of Service.
These documents are drafted up by lawyers. Their job is not to please the end users who care to read through the legalese. Their job is to create a document that will protect the product vendor in court, if and when the time comes.
Lets put an end to finding eccentricities in ToSs/EULAs, it's getting kind of redundant. If this is some sort of game to see who can find the most absurd clauses in these documents, we're all losing.
A photographer having to go to court to defend his ownership of photos they'd exhibited through twitpic and get paid by newspapers who claimed the ToS said he'd released his rights, demonstrates this is not a "please not again" problem, this is ongoing, big corps are misusing these at the expense of individual artists, and the problem's getting worse.
Every day I talk to artists who have no idea that posting their latest music video to a video sharing site could give that company performance rights in other media, or, as in this case, that pinning their own photos to Pinterest would let Pinterest publish a "Best Pins of 2012" book w/o compensating the artist.
This needs to be called out and both consumers and creators deserve to be informed.
You find that Pinterest's terms are awful, and stage a very successful revolt with your own site, sans the offensive terms. Users flock to your site, and Pinterest dies a sad death. One of the copyright owners of your "pinned" content decides to go after you, and decides to sue the pants off you. So you freak out and hire a top-notch lawyer, who will draft a new set of terms for your users to shield you from the liability you now realize you have.
Repeat, iterate, and before you know it -- your top-notch lawyer guarantees that you will face no more expensive liability, but you now have the onerous terms set out in practically all sites that allow user-generated content.
Basically, these terms allow you to bump the liability from yourself to the user who uploaded it (because they have pinned the pictures in bad faith, in violation of your terms, etc.)
So there's really no point railing against the terms -- they aren't going away, and the best you can hope for is very minor modifications of wording with sufficient popular pressure. Good luck on that.
If that lawyer exists, the Pirate Bay should hire him/her. I do not see how what they are doing is any different from what Pinterest does. Or am I overlooking something?
As others have said, Flickr does not have the same "we own it now" stipulation so don't suggest that this is simply the way it has to be. If Pintrest were so inclined, they could keep the indemnity boilerplate but stop taking ownership of posted content. This would move their site much closer to Fair Use territory, which would in turn help minimize the legal risk taken on by users who pin and comment on content that isn't their own. Instead, Pintrest want to make sure they don't close a potentially lucrative door and don't mind if they abuse everyone involved in making and sharing content while they explore their options.
Sounds like what a lot of people said about SOPA.
You see - When something is presented to us, and at first we yell. Well, 'they' listen, and tone it down. But 'they' bring it up again, and we yell (but not quite as much, or as loud). Eventually, the original goal is implemented, but with no fuss because we've been wore down.
To react with 'please not again' and to paint the person that is doing the finger pointing, as the bad guy - is the reaction that gets things FAR WORSE than this happening.
Please show me in Flickr's ToS where it says that you're giving Flickr the right to sell and relicense any photo you post there.
Pinterest's ToS go far beyond any other service I've seen. If you have examples of terms of service just as ridiculous as Pinterest's, by all means, please share them.
I've been using vi.sualize.us for quite some time. It has a very similar service to Pinterest but much better ToS. Have a read http://vi.sualize.us/help/terms/
So if this EULA holds up, it means it can easily expose you to millions of dollars of damages. Yes there are many exploitative EULAs out there but this is the first one I have seen that can get easily get you on the hook for millions of dollars for an innocuous action.
And how is this abusive? Why should they be held liable for what their users do?
From Youtube's ToS:
To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to defend,
indemnify and hold harmless YouTube, its parent corporation, officers,
directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims,
damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses
(including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from: (i) your use
of and access to the Service; (ii) your violation of any term of these
Terms of Service; (iii) your violation of any third party right, including
without limitation any copyright, property, or privacy right; or (iv) any
claim that your Content caused damage to a third party. This defense
and indemnification obligation will survive these Terms of Service and
your use of the Service.It might be interesting to put the largest internet companies' TOS and privacy policies on github.
Concerned about copyright? First off, I'm surprised anyone here would be concerned about copyright seeing as how everyone loves to talk about music/software pirates like they're modern day revolutionary heroes. Secondly, file a damn DMCA takedown request. We're not talking about the Pirate Bay here. It's Pinterest, they'll probably comply pretty quickly. Don't have time to patrol Pinterest for violations? Well, I feel for you but realistically it's a simple site where people share cool stuff. More than any other type of sharing website Pinterest users have the most benign intentions and it's really unlikely either Pinterest itself or it's users intend to profit from or intentionally violate copyright.
I live near Chicago where earthquakes are unheard of but there is a fault line running through Illinois and we do get the odd tremor every so often. There could be a disastrous earthquake here tonight (scientists do say that one day there will be a big one here) but I'm not cowering in my home or running through the streets trying to warn people of it. It's the same with this Pinterest and copyright thing. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's likely. Your time is better spent worrying about running your business and making it better rather than chasing around random Pinterest's users who could be... wait for it..l violating your copyright!!
Not to say copyright is a joke, I'm actually a rare supporter of it (to a degree) around here but seriously, it's friggin Pinterest, you're not losing a significant amount of money there.
Something along the lines of an avid lawyer decided to kill her account because she read the ToS and drew exactly the same conclusions as what you had just wrote.
While it's quite easy to regard this as been a ticking timebomb, a few things to probably note.
If you are a photographer or someone who holds copyright in a work you would most likely just issue a DMCA.
Now, lets assume that you aren't content with that. You might argue that you have incurred losses and want some form of damages. You are first going to have to contact Pinterest to get the information of the user who has listed this said work. Are Pinterest goijng to give up this information so willingly? Probably not...
The relevant article and HN discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3660323
IIRC, in this case you sue John Doe and have the court compel Pinterest to identify him.
Images on Pinterest, in some cases, were not even uploaded from a user's hard drive; they were pulled in via a the 'Pin It' button (http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/)
In this case, Pinterest even acknowledges that the images are not the property of the user, "When you pin from a website, we automatically grab the source link so we can credit the original creator."
I'll bet the 'Pin It' button ultimately gets them in hot water, because it's hard to argue the content is 'user generated' when they know, via their 'Pin It' code, exactly where the content is actually coming from.
§ 512(c) [DMCA Safe Harbor] also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent,
I wonder if 'the original source URL' of a image may be construed as a fact that would make infringing material apparent. IANAL.
And that's fine - their ToS says you need to be either the copyright holder or have consent from the copyright holder. For example, if I "pin" a CC licensed image, I have such consent.
I've seen warez sites with exactly the same disclaimer. It didn't work for them either.
It also should be noted that YouTube spent a great deal of money on settlements and arrangements with RIAA & MPAA members, content networks and others to survive.
The American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America, the North American Nature Photography Association, Professional Photographers of America. They do not have the deep pockets or political clout of MPAA or RIAA but they are large industry groups.
I think someone else mentioned a class action suite against Google for copyright infringement by photographers. The lawsuit started with scanning and displaying images from the Google Library Project but includes infringement claims for images.google.com, etc.
With respect to the following paragraph:
"So, if you snap an awesome photograph, upload it to your blog, and someone pins it, that person is either (1) claiming exclusive ownership of it; or (2) giving Pinterest your consent to reproduce it (and you just thought you were being flattered)."
Actually, no. You can't transfer a right you don't have. All rights to a work are vested in the author of a protected work; only the author can consent to any of the activities protected by copyright.
It's just like selling a house you don't own. First, you're committing fraud if you falsely represent that you have the right to sell it; and second, the actual owner isn't bound by anything you have done (the deed doesn't go to the putative buyer).
By the way, I found out that you can watermark all of your images that you're about to upload to Picasa Web via Picasa Desktop (there's an option to do that before you Sync to Web). I found that feature very useful if you organize your pictures using Picasa (and show them on your blog).
Just because you didn't watermark your image doesn't mean the copyright now belongs to Pintrest (or imgur, or Google+, or Facebook, etc) because people who didn't hold the copyright and didn't have the standing to give it away posted it.
Interesting. I'd like to see a court case further define what constitutes a "comment" on the web. Other sites do this too, for example Buzzfeed.com's entire business model is based on taking content from bloggers and then hosting it on their own site, without providing any kind of insightful comment.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/if-both-of-angelinas-legs-wer...
Another aspect of fair use is "not depriving the owner of their own commercial use of the work".
"I trusted the person who gave me the image" is not a legal defense for copyright infringement. Their only chance is to stay within the DMCA safe harbor or else they will eventually be shut down.
The "our users represent that the content is theirs" may not keep Pinterest from losing an eventual lawsuit, but it does complicate things enough that it discourages legal action. That may be sufficient for them to cash out long before the suits are complete.
Or, like YouTube, things like that may allow them to grow big enough that they end up with sufficient negotiating power that they can get away with quite a bit, and possibly reshape what's considered reasonable.
Imagine calling AAA to tow "your" car, and they show up and tow it, only to find out later that it wasn't your car at all.
This is exactly the sort of thing that CC and GPL were created to combat: ruining someone's life through the legal system based on abuse of the copyright system. You want to sue someone over copyright violations of information you have copyright on? Fine. You want to sell something licensed under CC-By-SA? Fine. But you better be ready to comply to the license and allow whoever you give those works to the right to copy, sell and modify those works. I highly doubt Pinterest is prepared for this, and their TOS is overreaching.
I get the impression that there's much wider public acceptance of sharing (pirating?) pictures than music, movies, or software. I don't have a good answer as to why this might be, but I'd be curious what HN thinks.
Anecdotally, it's because photographs and images are seen as "easier to reproduce" (whether this is true or not is another matter), and therefore possibly easier to justify by those doing the sharing.
That, and there's far less friction to sharing photos/images than video and software.
What's worse is that these shady sharing practices have begun to support a broader ecosystem of image finding scavengers such as http://www.whattopin.com (see below).
Here is a support ticket we received today at Fotoblur which illustrates the problems we are seeing (a bit of broken English but you get the picture):
"I am user the http://www.fotoblur.com/portfolio/agnieszkabalut?p=1&id=... Another user Elinka used my photo art- senza titolo2 by Agnieszka Balut....... (via Elinka) in the web-site http://www.whattopin.com/topic/photography/?id=283634 - Printerest (commercial use)
and in the http://elinka.tumblr.com/post/18734723798/senza-titolo2-by-a... without my permission.
All my images are protected by Copyright (reproduction and printing). All images on these are the exclusive property of Agnieszka Balut and protected by the Copyright . Therefore prohibited the publication and reproduction without written permission from Agnieszka Balut. Any violation will be prosecuted."
As you can see, this type of sharing confuses people. We usually explain "fair use" to them but they really don't care. They feel they have rights and they want action taken. I can fully understand why Flickr blocked Pinterest if they have been getting the complaints such as we've seen. In the end the burden falls on the image owner and what ends up happening is they have to chase down every site owner whose members improperly post their content. They then lose faith in participating at all because of their inability to control their content.
So I, as a Content Creator, have to a) be mindful of, and b) take action to opt out of 1) Pinterest, 2) any other of a potentially large number of sites / applications, purely in order to ensure said sites don't claim commercial rights to and derive income from my work and effort?
Not the way it works, or should work, say I.
1. When a user "pins" an image elsewhere online, the image is downloaded by Pinterest to their server. When other users browse Pinterest, it is served directly by Pinterest's servers.
2. When a user "pins" an image elsewhere online, the image URL is saved by Pinterest to their server. When other users browse Pinterest, they are downloading the image directly from the original source.
Scenario (1) I see legal issues with. But scenario (2)? Isn't Pinterest simply providing a link (ala a search engine)? Moreover, isn't this just how the internet works?
Surely this has come up before yet I am having trouble finding a similar case.
I think their best bet is to store the images only as a cache, and not as a permanent import. If the site owner decides to take down the original, then the cache should disappear soon thereafter.
If I publish a review of a work of art, including a reproduction of the work, in a magazine, my copyright would cover the entire article including the reproduction. I wouldn't be claiming copyright on the original work.
I too find this insane. If anything qualifies for fair use, surely pinterest does. "Hey look at this cool thing!" is about as close as I can imagine to the platonic ideal of discussing a copyrighted work.
No one freaked out over /r/pics, so what's the deal here? I hesitate to point out that pinterest differs mostly in the gender demographics of the user base, but... yeah.
/r/pics is just a collection of links to images; it does not reproduce or redistribute the images.
It has nothing to do with whether or not /r/pics constitutes fair use, just if-it-isn't-fair-use-who-gets-sued? No one, at the time or now, seriously thought that there was a legal problem for anyone with reddit. So why pinterest? Again, part of me is really suspicious that it's because it's a chick site that doesn't cater to geeks.
I prefer the old ones though http://web.archive.org/web/20110619022738/http://500px.com/t...
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/382781/business-casual...
These are images that are publicly available on the internet and have been made available, in most cases, by the owner. Is there really a case that copying these images off the internet is illegal?
The real deal is that Pinterest is screwed either way. These terms sound scary but so long as they are enforced sanely there should be no problem. What do you expect them to do? Assume liability for users posting content they should not be posting? They might as well not exist. A lot of startups these days may as well not even try to get traction as long as bloggers keep getting their panties in a twist over every TOS they see.
Pinterest provides a service for free that people seem to love. So long as no one is paying them and they haven't gone public they're damn smart to have these terms. If I ran Pinterest I wouldn't want to assume liability for some asshole who leaks a top secret photo on my site that I let him use for free and as long as I'm giving that service for free I'm going to make some cash out of my users. This is nowhere near evil. It's business. If someone doesn't like it they don't have to use it.
Question: How do you get over writer's block? Answer: Start reading some terms of service or privacy policy docs from any popular online startup and manufacture some outrage over it. Truth is, if you read any TOS or privacy policy you're going to find something you can turn into a big deal most of the time. I've had it with the TOS/privacy policy outrage blogs.
So which is it? Is it bad that Pinterest is mostly "stolen" content, or bad that we're not allowed to post similarly "stolen" content on YouTube? The former implies that Pinterest should start cracking down on people who post content they don't own; the latter implies that YouTube should stop doing so (and therefore, copyright law should change).
That assumption seems fairly inaccurate, see this quote: "Remarkably, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are ... uploaded without the copyright owner’s permission but left up by the owner’s choice." [1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/technology/03youtube.html
The NYT quote is talking just about the videos with ads, and then only discussing them in terms of views (not in terms of percentages of actual content uploaded, which is something like 24+ hours of content every minute).
Probably not the best argument but the more important point I want to make is that this is a case where you can't use semantics to argue your way through. There are a lot of variables involved that make this a very muddy issue. Things like intent and the probability that the photos will be used for profit need to be taken into account. Just because something can happen doesn't means the odds are high that it will.
Plus copyright holders still have the DMCA and it's unlikely Pinterest won't abide.
EDIT: I just realized that the way you framed the issue puts the onus on Pinterest to police the content. It's not a bad idea that they do but with video it's far easier to spot a famous movie or tv show than it is some freelance photographer's copyrighted work. The whole point of Pinterest's policy is to put the onus on the user to make sure they don't upload things they shouldn't. That's smart and combined with copyright holders' way to complain through DMCA, I see nothing wrong here.
Couldn't they avoid liability without claiming ownership of my own original work? I'm an illustrator, I believe there is a story here.
I read a lot of comments like this and I always wonder why it always sounds like someone is forcing you to put your content on their site. No one is obligated to post anything to any website. There are a lot of ways to put your works online and not give up your ownership. If you don't like one site's policy on this then there are plenty of others. Pinterest is free. No one is entitled to tell them how to run their business just the same as they can't force you to use it. I feel like this is lost on a lot of people. I'm just 25 but I feel old, like somehow the generation just behind me and maybe my generation too see websites like Facebook and Google and Pinterest as services that we are somehow entitled to and should be able to control without ever paying a dime. Nothing in this life is free. If you get something for nothing, take a look around. You're probably paying in some form that isn't monetary.
Your argument boils down to 'If you don't like it, don't use it.' So I guess any more discussion on the subject is henceforth mute?
It's easy to let the user own their own things. Even free site Tumblr does this:
First, "Subscriber shall own all Subscriber Content that Subscriber contributes to the Site," which clarifies the user, not Tumblr, owns it.
Second, the user "grants ... license ... to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute," which lets Tumblr host it on their web and caching servers, "modify, create derivative works and store such Subscriber Content", which lets them make thumbnails and posts out of it, "and to allow others to do so ('Content License')", which lets them use a CDN, "in order to provide the Services."
The key is "in order to provide the Services." Outside of providing Tumblr, you own your stuff, and they can't do anything else with it.
Tumblr's in New York and has great lawyers. Pinterest should be publicly shamed for burying their non-standard claim of the right to sell your creative works in the middle of a ToS.
It's not like I am obligated to recognize Pinterest's right to exist. Some companies are based on questionable or illegal practices, period.
I know it's cool to be contrarian around here but give me a break. Look at this like a human, not a robot, and you'll see this is a mountain made out of a mole hill. Not saying you in particular are looking at this like a robot, I was speaking in general there.
If "we have non-exclusive rights to use and sell everything you post on our site and you take all responsibility if infringement does occur" is now "standard boilerplate legalese" then actually yes I do think people should be complaining, and not just at Pinterest.
I suppose ultimately they could be going for the YouTube style model of stimulating large amounts of infringement, and then making DMCA compliance easy, but also offering content owners the ability to profit from advertising along side that originally infringing content.
I don't think that model is inherently a bad thing, but it can make life very tedious for users and for smaller content producers so people should know what they are getting into. The history of YouTube monetization has been a total mess for a lot of people, and it seems to regularly go through new rounds of turmoil as they tweak their algorithms or more aggressive content owners join the market.
When their ToS says "Pin your own content here", then says, "Thank you, now we can do anything we want to with it, including sell it," that's going too far.
That would be like Flickr claiming they (not you) had the right to sell your photos. Or Rackspace claiming they had the right to sell anything you posted on your web site.
This ToS is an extreme overreach, and your casual dismissal of that extremity is itself cautionary -- what can happen when one becomes too saturated with the 70+ hours of ToS reading a typical Internet user would have to do each year to keep up.
If this part (obviously this isn't the exact phrasing) was removed, then they wouldn't have the right to serve your content on their site. They couldn't use a screenshot containing your content in any advertising they did. They couldn't use your content alongside advertising. They couldn't do a lot of things they do now.
Allowing someone to upload something doesn't inherently give you any rights to use that content. If you remove the parts you are complaining about, then they can't do anything that they are doing.
I don't like that very much.
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.
See for example section 6.C in YouTube's ToS. http://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms
Why? Because without this blanket waiver it opens them up to all kinds of legal issues since a core mechanic of their site is re-pinning.
If you upload a photo to their site and someone else re-pins it, did that person just violate your copyright?
If Pinterest implements a "most popular pins" page and features one of your photos on that page, did they just violate your copyright?
Yes, you can come up with legalese for each potential scenario, but it really does complicate things. It's easier for them to just have a blanket clause and act in good faith, than open themselves up to the possibility of accidentally using someone's work in a way their ToS didn't whitelist.
It shouldn't say much more than "you give us the right to use your content to fulfill the services you ask us to provide, and you have the right to remove your content at any time."
More important than the terms is the character of the founders and the company. Do you trust Pinterest to do right by you? Flickr has a similar clause, for example, but photographers still trust them.
If you don't trust Pinterest, that's fine. But in that case, do you really think changing some words on one of their pages is going to make a difference in their overall behavior?
Your examples after the link don't seem to have much to do with selling the works though. In Youtube's case, it's to allow them to advertise with overlays. Maybe that is where Pinterest is going as well.
That is the key line everyone is skipping over. It limits the rest of the clause quite a bit.
It provides some limits, but not the ones consistent with the service they claim to offer. They can start selling mugs with my photos whenever they like. The horror :O
1. Pin their own copyrighted work 2. Wait for someone else to view it on Pinterest 3. Sue Pinterest for distributing or performing it.
If you don't like it, don't use it. Go back to the pre-social web with your mom and grandmother. If you are going to criticize it or upvote it, think for a moment about the reasoning behind it. Yesterday Path. Today Pinterest. Let's hope someone else makes something great for you to kick in the teeth tomorrow.
Shut the fuck up already.