I know I'm not the first or the last to comment on the whole Pinterest issue. If you have missed it, there are some really good {balanced} posts that can fill you in.
Last week I caught up on my blog reading and here's the short version of what I understood:
Pinterest users might be violating copyright/intellectual property laws. When we all signed up for Pinterest we agreed and said that we would only pin pictures that we had permission to pin and share. Pinterest has covered themselves by their terms so in the end, the owner of the image could come back against the user who pinned it without permission in the first place. And that's a huge problem because I'm pretty sure that I didn't obtain permission to pin, oh... almost all the pictures that I pinned. It's a little confusing to say the least.
Where do I stand as a blogger? Pinterest has quickly become one of my top traffic referrers. So how do I say no to traffic when that's what pretty much all bloggers want? I blog to share my quilts, tutorials, and other creations. I'm posting in a public forum and we all know that most of what you post on the internet becomes fair game. I'm also not ready to be paranoid enough to think that everyone who pins my pictures is out to steal my work, copy it or take credit for it.
As a blogger and creative person, I love Pinterest.
What do I not like about Pinterest? That they reserve specific rights to photos pinned on their site. A lot of rights. I suppose it's the industry that I work in but I often wonder how businesses, websites, etc make money. Pinterest is one of them. They don't have ads, the accounts are free, the amount of pins you can do is unlimited, and there is no cost to the user {us}.
So what gives? Aside from investors, how do they run a very hip, successful company without earning revenue from their users? Part of that answer is that they can sell, license, copy, edit, alter any images pinned on their site. The slippery slope to that is that we gave them that right the second we pinned a photo that we supposedly had permission to pin. In the end it seems to be the artist, photographer, blogger, etc who pays the price. Ugh.
To me, having my photos pinned isn't a big deal if they link back to me. But what would be a big deal would be seeing one of my pattern covers pop up in some magazine because Pinterest sold a collage of "inspiration". And BTW, there are magazines on Pinterest who are pinning their favorite "ideas". My fabric mini-bolts showed up on their board and the pin did not link back to me or my tutorial.
As a blogger who gets excited when I see my quilts pinned and as a person who enjoys pinning creative things that I find online, I don't know what I'm going to do with my boards yet. Perhaps I'll clean out a lot of my pins that don't come from Pinterest friendly blogs and make sure that the ones I keep clearly give credit back to the creator but that's a big task.
What I wish is that Pinterest would allow users to make their boards private until all of these issues can be clarified. But I bet they won't do that because private boards would take away from the flow of photos and information that Pinterest can sell.
So I'll go ahead and say that I'm a Pinterest friendly Polite blog. :) BUT, I do ask that proper credit be given and part of that is my job and why you will being seeing watermarks on my pictures from now on. The other part can be helped by us bloggers setting a good example on Pinterest.
How do you do that? When you pin something from a Pinterest friendly blog, take a minute and instead of just pinning or re-pinning what the last person wrote, note where the pin originally came from. On our blogs we do that when we give credit to inspiration, other blogs, links, etc... so it makes good sense to do the same when we pin as well.
Here are my official Pinterest guidelines:
- You may pin most pictures from this blog. {see below}
- Please give proper credit back to this blog.
- Please don't pin a tutorial and then give all the instructions for the tutorial in your pin. That's not cool!
- Please don't alter my photos before or after you pin them.
- Please do not ever pin pictures of my family without my permission... which will most likely be "NO" even if you ask me.
And BTW, I wrote this post yesterday and then yesterday evening I stumbled upon an actual pattern page from Modern Log Cabin Quilts pinned for anyone to see and use without purchasing the book. This is exactly what bothers me about Pinterest; someone's hard work being ripped off and distributed for free. Plus now Pinterest {according to their terms & conditions} reserves all rights to sell or license what just happens to be previously copyrighted material. I reported the pin but nothing has been done as of this morning. It's a very slippery slope...