Companies Must Opt-Out Of Pinterest To Protect Copyright?

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If I am reading this blog post correctly, Pinterest expects companies complaining about copyright violations to opt-out of Pinterest by installing third party code on their websites? I have a feeling this is going to end up in court.

As a company, we care about respecting the rights of copyright holders. We work hard to follow the DMCA procedure for acting quickly when we receive notices of claimed copyright infringement. We have a form for reporting claims of copyright violations on our site here. Every pin has a flag to make reporting easier. We also know that copyright is a complicated and nuanced issue and we have knowledgable people who are providing lots of guidance.
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I'm pretty sure pinterest is safe in most cases. Taking pictures of stuff displayed in public is valid fair use.
 
Aseras said:
I'm pretty sure pinterest is safe in most cases. Taking pictures of stuff displayed in public is valid fair use.
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Sure, you go on a trip and take a picture of a statue in a public place with no notice and you are ok. That has nothing to do with pintrest though. The photographer holds the copyright to that image. If the photographer hasn't granted pintrest permission to use the image, how are they not in violation of that photographer's copyright? Same goes for the original artwork posted on pintrest as well. Just looking at the front page now, not a single image on it is something that there isn't effectively copyright on it. They aren't even remotely safe. Nothing on their front page is public domain.

That doesn't mean they are likely to get really screwed either. The nature of their service doesn't fall apart entirely if they are aggressive in obeying take down notices as it is kind of a firehose of random crap. Additionally, they provide a mechanism to protect your content from their system that is pretty simple. For small businesses, that's going to be preferable to any legal action.
 
Steve said:
If I am reading this blog post correctly, Pinterest expects companies complaining about copyright violations to opt-out of Pinterest by installing third party code on their websites? I have a feeling this is going to end up in court.
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Where are you getting that from? :confused:

To me it reads that they are complying with the DMCA by providing a notification form that they will then use to remove infringing content.... AND they are going above and beyond their duties under the DMCA by telling companies how they can help prevent anything from getting pinned in the first place.

Now if they stop responding to takedown requests and try to solely rely on the posted code solution, then they will have a problem.
 
Umm i see it everywhere but still do not know what pinterest is :/
 
Steve said:
If I am reading this blog post correctly, Pinterest expects companies complaining about copyright violations to opt-out of Pinterest by installing third party code on their websites? I have a feeling this is going to end up in court.
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It's not third party software, it's a simple meta tag embedded in the HTML or CSS of your site.

Which is easy enough to do to a templated site, but still annoying as hell.
 
rhouck said:
Now if they stop responding to takedown requests and try to solely rely on the posted code solution, then they will have a problem.
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This is why this is an issue in the first place.

Pinterest allows you to post my copyrighted work / trademarked logo, alter it as you see fit, even if it is defamitory, etc. and then it gets repinned thousands of times...

...and their solution is "don't like it, install this code."

And you don't see why copyright holders / trademark holders are pissed?
 
This seems no different than the robots.txt standard that is in use today to keep search engine crawlers off your pages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt). This seems like a good thing to me, making it easier for people. You can still just go ahead and fill out those DMCA claim forms if you hate a little bit of meta code.
 
Steve said:
This is why this is an issue in the first place.

Pinterest allows you to post my copyrighted work / trademarked logo, alter it as you see fit, even if it is defamitory, etc. and then it gets repinned thousands of times...

...and their solution is "don't like it, install this code."

And you don't see why copyright holders / trademark holders are pissed?
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Doesn't look a lot different from ReddPics.
 
Steve said:
This is why this is an issue in the first place.

Pinterest allows you to post my copyrighted work / trademarked logo, alter it as you see fit, even if it is defamitory, etc. and then it gets repinned thousands of times...

...and their solution is "don't like it, install this code."

And you don't see why copyright holders / trademark holders are pissed?
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But this forum allows me to post any image I want as well... and the only recourse is through a DMCA takedown request (or PMing one of you of course :) ).

My understanding is that if you make a DMCA takedown request of a single image on Pinterest, it will also remove all of the re-pins. Thus it is actually *easier* for a rightsholder to remove all the pins of its work, rather than if those thousands of re-pins had been individual uploads. The same is true for resharing pics on Facebook/Google+; it creates a trail to remove all infringing works rather than when everyone uploads images uniquely.

Again, I'm not sure how their suggestion of using the code to supplement the traditional DMCA takedown request is a bad thing. So their answer is "don't like it, issue a DMCA request... AND install this code to help prevent it in the future."

Unless you are suggesting that the entire Pinterest model is designed around encouraging copyright/trademark infringement and it is has no reasonable legitimate business purpose.... in which case there really isn't any other solution to the issues you perceive to exist with Pinterest outside of shutting it down.

I also admit that I have no idea why people are that pissed because, if you look at the service, it is not designed as some evil lair of copyright/trademark infringement... especially since, when you pin something, it links to the ORIGINAL site! It is a great tool for people to post images from blogs, for products, etc that will catch people's eyes and then drive them to the original site.
 
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