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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

For "content" creators, these are not absurdities, these are terms that can make or break your ability to get paid for your work and put food on the table.

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.

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Let me rephrase GP's comment, since I felt the same thing as them. Allow me to set out a hypothetical.

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.

This post we're discussing _is_ the popular pressure. And yes, I also wish them good luck because the pendulum is currently far too in the direction against fairness to end-users.

Exactly. Saying that this is just the way it is is ludicrous. They could under sufficient pressure change the wording so that they aren't assuming ownership or unlimited use and that it is something more akin to fair use.

"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"

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?

You're missing a big point though. Does Pintrest need to internalize and take ownership over all of the content on the site in order to protect themselves legally? It seems that would open them up to far greater liability. And then in the same breath they foist that liability onto their users simply for doing what they are 'supposed' to do (pin things they are interested in).

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.

>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.

Sounds like what a lot of people said about SOPA.

Nope, SOPA was another (succesful) attempt by user-generated content sites to deflect liability away from themselves. That's my point, these onerous terms are pretty much in the same spirit, from an Internet company's point of view, as the SOPA protest.

It seems like there is an easy solution, just never post something on the web in a format you wouldn't be ok with others using without. Post 800x600 images with a contact me link, or put your name/contact on the picture so that it is attractive but still a little bit annoying, etc.

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