Pinterest posts new Terms of Service | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest posts new Terms of Service

pinterest.com

32 pointskennu24 comments

The front page of Pinterest looks like a Ladies Home Journal exploded. I'd venture to say that 90% of the content is third party content used without permission. The only saving grace is that most of it is commercial images from ezines and retailers who will benefit from the traffic and so have no incentive to sue. But eventually it seems like there will be repercussions.

On the other hand, when a sizable population of middle-aged women become the pirates, maybe our elected officials will be less inclined to set the dogs on them. Could Pinterest be a watershed moment in the copyright wars?

The content on Pinterest almost always leads you back to the source site. I doubt that comes under pirating.

Or am I missing something?

Crediting the source doesn't mean it automatically falls under fair use.

Pinterest's ToS state that you cannot pin material if you don't have copyright permission. Of course, this is probably a large percentage of what gets pinned.

The "almost always" part is a bit of a problem. Why does Pinterest allow people to remove attribution? If Pinterest cares about respecting copyright, the simplest step would be to preserve attribution (and on a practical note, the resulting referer logs would notify image creators that their stuff is being pinned).

You're not allowed to redistribute copyrighted material without a license. That is the entire point of copyright. And most of the content of the site is directly infringing.

I'd venture to say that 90% of the content is third party content used without permission. The only saving grace is that most of it is commercial images from ezines and retailers who will benefit from the traffic and so have no incentive to sue.

YouTube was 90% third-party content when it started out, and companies had a MUCH larger incentive to sue. YT made out fine, so I wonder if those repercussions will affect Pinterest in any way.

middle aged? You may be thinking of zynga. Pinterest appeals to the 18-35 female demo

True, but middle aged women are orders of magnitude more likely to use Pinterest than say, Bittorrent or Megaupload.

I couldn't figure out what changed from this page, so this is from their email to their users:

We'd encourage you to read these changes in their entirety, but we thought there were a few changes worth noting.

Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse. We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.

Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.

TLDR:

Pinterest is getting lots of criticism from press on specific issues and they are editing them.

* "pro-ana" (anorexia) pinboards containing "thinspo" (pictures and sayings to reinforce anorexia) were featured in a Jezebel post. Pinterest clamped down and said they won't tolerate self-harm. See:

http://jezebel.com/5893382/the-scary-weird-world-of-pinteres...

* You need copyright permission to post something to Pinterest but virtually nobody has permission, so they added better takedown methods. See:

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/149169388/pinterest-wades-in-m...

* Pinterest is adding private pinboards and an API.

When can I get API access?

That NPR article doesn't really say much.

Pinterest added the nopin meta tag but that's absolutely the wrong approach. The onus should not be upon the copyright owner to police violations (after the fact).

Also, while Pinterest may be a fast growing site, it's still just a startup and the hubristic assumption that the rest of the Net adopt it's nopin tag just does not make sense.

I would say Pinterest needs to start from a point of not violating copyright rather than try to brush it off onto their users and not providing stronger tools to prevent such events from happening.

I really, really, really wish that anyone posting updated TOS (and similar contract-y documents) would include a diff with the old one.

Like a changelog? I like it.

If you can believe it. Who's going to check if their summary really matches the 75 page terms?

EFF, CDT, PFIR, etc. If you release a deliberately misleading summary of your TOS, it triggers the "the coverup is worse than the crime" rule, magnifying the resulting scandal.

Tumblr host their terms of service in a Git repo on Github.

https://github.com/tumblr/policy

Reddit keeps theirs in a wiki: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/useragreement

I interned for an advertising aggregate - Evidon - and one of their projects is to monitor TOS for various advertising companies and show a diff. I wish it would catch on for everyone.

Been interested in doing this too, but reconsidered since I don't know about property laws for EULAs/TOSs. But a public-facing TOS that tries to bind users and says "this document can change any time for any reason, and we will notify you by email, and it is your responsibility to keep up to date with it" should have some public domainness to it, even if it legally isn't: users should be able to "congregate publicly" to discuss their archived copies of TOSs.

(The counterargument of "don't use the service if you don't even agree with how the TOS is deployed" is technically agreeable but utterly impractical since "I am whimsical" clause in TOSs these days protects the vendor and not the user, and places 100% burden of trust on the user that the whimsical TOS will not arbitrarily screw you over later. Every vendor relies on the fact that there are so many other vendors out there, that some percent can eventually get a free ride on trust)

Suppose we provide the venue for congregation. How to ensure legal survivability?

I have a Pinterest account merely for seeing the application and having some vague understanding of how it works. Being an account owner, I received the email notification for this change, which is omitted from this link.

  Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

  We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.
 
  We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements. 

  Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

I thought they did a nice job summarizing and convey in a concise, understandable way, the changes they've made.

I get that pinterest has to get their legal mumbo jumbo in order so that they limit their liability, but practically speaking it's a total joke. Everyone knows that the majority of content "pinned" on the site is done without permission. Personally - I don't care as long as it's linking back to the source. Same as Google image search in my book. Legally speaking...eh, I don't care - I'll leave it to others to discuss that.

How do these issues of copyright infringement not come up immediately during the formulation of the business plan?

Is the idea to get big really quickly and deal with the legal issues at that time?

And there I got happy thinking there was a explicit ban on pictures of shoes. :(

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