Pinterest and the end of copyright protection

[Errant]

Pinterest is covering their butt by making the user add a comment to any photo pinned. Under fair use, a photo can be used for the purpose of commentary.

 

[HumphreyBear]

I have to object to your terminology. <snip>
I am a software creator and user of many different open source artforms. I am an open source advocate. I am not a pirate, I am not a thief.

Herbie, I used single quotation marks under the following accepted usage (explanation here, from Wikipaedia), because it is my experience (I work in IT as well) that the traditional Open Source movement as you described above is becoming a small voice sidelined in the corruption of the term. I never intended to give the inference that all traditional open source advocates are listed amongst the thievery and piracy.

Signaling unusual usage
Quotation marks are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that a word is not being used in its current commonly accepted sense.

One of my firm's specialities is HPC (High Performance Computing/Clustering) for, primarily, research and development within government and educational facilities. We encounter a considerable amount of true open source software utilised by passionate developers operating under its original spirit for the betterment of the world at large (medical research, climate modelling etc.). Within our corporate clients in this space we encounter mostly commercial COTS applications and if I encountered a company rebadging an open source application and selling it in the commercial world I would report it (but have never found it). Another speciality is desktop & application delivery and data centre automation where we encounter a far more numerous group of young engineers who call themselves 'open source advocates' but are the inspiration for my rant above. They are appropriating the moniker and are far more prevalent in my experience. I am constantly battling client's expectations they should be able to rip off both open source and commercial software and use it, or redevelop it, without paying for it, hidden under their claim that proprietary/closed source software is ... (fill in argument: immoral/unconstitutional/killing the software development world etc. etc.) when really they are just too cheap to pay for it.

Ironically the biggest software piracy case here last year was the NSW Police Force being sued for illegally using software on their internal systems. (I wasn't involved on either side).

Humphrey

 

[HumphreyBear]

99% of the images seem to be from women posting wishlists of things they want to buy, and about 1% of those photos appear to be images the posters actually shot themselves.

hehe. Though if someone pins their own photo then I think they lose the copyright protection we've been talking about. Maybe we need to work out a way to get the 99% of users to pin low res photos from a gallery we put together for printed and framed editions our photos, and let hubby buy them. A "take back the night" type of thing. But the concept of the site is symptomatic of the erosion of the concept of copyright (unless you are a megacorporation). That terms of use quote is particularly disgraceful, but not atypical of many of the new breed of web-hosted services I suspect.

I really wish I could claim that I sell my photos for profit!

You could and should (if you can part with them).

Google+ does not. Score one for "Be less evil"

Fixed it for ya...

I still haven't been able to find a statement on ExPo about the site's position on this subject. I'm not suspecting they secretly publish the information elsewhere for profit - the general theme of the site is open and collaborative, and all my remote dealings with Ray etc. have been positive. I'd just like to see a statement on here somewhere. Maybe I need to sign up again to see if it is available there.

 

[haven]

Pinterest is revising its terms of service to address several of the points raised in our discussion so far. Read about it here
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/pinterest-terms-api-copyrigh/

One change is the removal of the right to sell material posted to Pinterest. They claim that was never their intention. My guess is that they copied their terms of service from some other photo sharing site, and overlooked this detail.

Another change is to prohibit commercial use of stuff displayed on the Pinterest web pages. In other words, you can't use Pinterest to promote your business, or build a business on the ability to copy material from Pinterest to another website, such as Facebook. (I think Pinterest wants to reserve that ability to themselves.)

Pinterest also plans to simplify the reporting of a copyright violation.