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Meta name="pinterest" content="nopin"
- aristus 15y agoI was amazed at how quickly Facebook's og meta tags were adopted by many sites back in the day; I used to run an archiving/scraping service and it helped me a lot. I can't help but think Pinterest should also offer a meta tag for sites that want um, Pin... interest. Something beyond og:image.
- rahulcap 15y agoThis is a smart move. It's much easier to tag your site than issue a takedown request. I mean, it probably won't stop copyright infringement too much , but it gives Pinterest something to point to when people complain.
- huggyface 15y agoWhy, though, is it opt out rather than opt in? Given the claimed advantages of pinterest participation, why not have those sites that want to participate add the meta tag? It seems somewhat backwards to demand that sites that don't want to participate add a meta tag for a single, specific site. EDIT: One interesting side effect of moderation on sites like this is that it actively discourages conversation. I've replied to various questions and, without fail, when someone asserts their opinion by downvoting this, they need to seek out and downvote every other post I've made on this topic. Weak sauce.
- eropple 15y agoYou're joking, right? The overwhelming majority of sites either don't care or are positive towards stuff like Pinterest (more ad eyeballs, for example). It's the rarity to [i]not[/i] want to be shareable.
- huggyface 15y agoNo, I'm not "joking". The default license for content without an explicit license is that it is copyrighted. There are existing tags for looser licensing (e.g. creative commons). This is an obnoxious demand, and the "we decide whether it benefits you, and thus determine how we violate your rights" is a garbage way to proceed. No kidding it serves pinterest, though.
- eurleif 15y agoDo you think Google Image Search is bad, too? If not, what's the relevant difference?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- franze 15y agoever heard of "fair use"?
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoSo you're saying Pinterest only copy US created content to their servers?
- ubernostrum 15y agoYup, I have. And saying "fair use" makes about as much sense as saying "abracadabra" -- it's an incredibly narrow set of criteria that you can use if you're actually in court, not a magic word you can utter to make things work to your advantage. Meanwhile, the assumed default status of anything created in a Berne Convention country in the past 90 years or so is still "all rights reserved".
- dannyr 15y agoIt's like saying being indexed by Google should be opt-in.
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- Karunamon 15y agoWhy? Because this is the internet. I shouldn't have to ask permission every time I want to create a hyperlink.
- huggyface 15y agoIt has nothing to do with creating a hyperlink. It has to do with misappropriating copyrighted content for commercial purposes.
- Karunamon 15y agoRephrase, Everyone on the internet shouldn't have to ask permission when they want to create a hyperlink on a public site.
- btipling 15y agoIt's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.
- Karunamon 15y ago>It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to. More likely than not, hotlinking. Also, lawyers ruin everything.
- chc 15y agoThey're putting it on the Web. Traditionally, there is assumed to be a certain degree of permission involved in putting content on the Web unless you specifically indicate otherwise. If we don't assume this permission, Web browsers would be just as bad, since they download and cache your copyrighted content. (Note to downvoters: If you believe I'm wrong, a response would do a better job of correcting the misinformation. If you believe I'm posting this is bad faith, you're mistaken. I really don't see how the Web can coexist with the assumption "A program may not download resources offered by a webserver without explicit opt-in permission.")
- TeMPOraL 15y agoI completely agree with you. Opt-in means nothing would ever be done in this world, because everyone would be wasting resources on getting permissions. No browsers, no search engines, no Wikipedia, no HN, no nothing. The rule of thumb should be: you opt-in when you put your stuff on the Internet.
- jaredsohn 15y agoAs noted by a comment on the page, it would be better if they had a more generic meta name value so that content creators don't have to do the same for every website that they don't want their content distributed to.
- callmeed 15y agoOf course you can still open an image directly and pin that. Why a company would not want their product image and a link back to their site is beyond me (it's basically free advertising).
- franze 15y ago>Of course you can still open an image directly and pin that well, to counter this scenario pinterest would need to support the X-Pinterest-Tag: nopin HTTP header - for images, PDF, all non HTML data (similar to googles "standard" X-Robots-Meta: noimageindex, see: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index...)
- ars 15y agoAs a side note, you are not supposed to use X- anymore. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3539663 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3539663
- btn 15y agoThat is still a draft document, and has not been accepted as a BCP (Best Current Practice) RFC yet.
- xtoddx 15y agoOr the more generic X-Allow-Repost: no But why don't they just look at EXIF data for copyright/license and respect that?
- marquis 15y agoI'm concerned this will lead to a number of meta-tags we will have to include in our ever-growing header tags. Can Pinterest and Facebook not just acknowledge robots.txt or we invent a new tag like rel=nofollow?
- guan 15y agorobots.txt is for web crawlers that follow links, it doesn't usually apply to robots that fetch a single page based on a user request. But they could invent and adopt a new tag.
- franze 15y agogoogle obeys the <meta name="robots" content="noimageindex"> - or - <meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex"> meta tag. well, i guess pinterest didn't knew about it and instead reinvented - an unknown, obscure, niche - wheel, again. (see: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79892 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...)
- danilocampos 15y agoYeah, but this way they get to write a blogpost that's basically... "So do you guys know how popular we are? SO popular." But they get to do it under the cover of being both helpful and community-minded. It's clever.
- jackowayed 15y agoShowing up in an image index (generated by crawlers) is different enough from showing up on Pinterest (curated by humans) that allowing one to make the choices independently is totally reasonable.
- franze 15y agoit's a stretchy argument, but one i'm going make anyway: before the crawl, there is discovery. discovery is the process of knowing all the URLs to pass to the crawler. discovery is fueled by * links * sitemap.xml who creates links (and sitemaps)? humans (either editorially or programmatically, but at some point humans were involved in the link creation process) defining the pinterest fetching process as "not indexing" or "not crawling" seems a little bit unfair against your friendly neighborhood googlebot. also if pinterest is "currated by humans" then the pin-tag would be unnecessary. a simple plain text "DO NOT PIN THIS" message in the article/product/image/.. (whatever people pin these days) description would be sufficient.
- zerostar07 15y agoWell at least they should honor that too since clearly the owner does not want their photos discoverable ( plus by crossing over to pinterest they become indexable, right?)
- billnapier 15y agowhat's next? meta name="browser" content="nolink" to not allow deep linking? or linking at all? this is stupid.
- staunch 15y agoIt seems pretty obvious that Pinterest wouldn't qualify for safe harbor under the DMCA. > Direct Financial Benefit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Direct_Financial_Benefit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L... The entire service is reliant on the ability of users to "pin" copyrighted images from across the web. > Knowledge of Infringing Material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Knowledge_of_Infringing_Material http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L... Anyone with any objectivity can see that 99% of the images on Pinterest are being used without permission. It also seems that Pinterest themselves are "uploading" all the images to their servers. Users just tell Pinterest which images to take. Technically it would be no different if YouTube were to store/serve Netflix videos after a user "pinned" them.
- girlvinyl 15y agoI disagree. Pinterest would certainly qualify for safe harbor due to the "Automated upload mechanism". Meaning they have no manual or editorial review process. Users simply click and it happens through code. That's the biggest distinction.
- oldstrangers 15y agoYep. I don't see how it's any different from someone uploading a copyrighted video to youtube...
- staunch 15y agoDid you miss the part where users don't actually do the uploading? Just a minor point, but potentially important.
- oldstrangers 15y agoThey're both essentially a single button click. Technically, there is a difference. Realistically, there isn't.
- jarin 15y agoWhat they really should do instead is either use the Open Graph tags or some other kind of meta tags (if absolutely necessary) to ensure proper attribution. Then, they could take it a step further and use perceptual hashing to compare images and make sure the original source gets the credit.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoIsn't this [meta name="pinterest" content="don't infringe my copyright"] ???
- rangibaby 15y agoWhen will the IP madness stop?
- robocat 15y agoSurely the proper place for this is robots.txt, maybe using something similar to Google Images: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35308 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Requiring sites to update their html seems overtly obnoxious (or maybe just thoughtless!).
- newman314 15y agoI'm sorry but this is ridiculous. Pinterest might be a "hot" startup but it's still a gnat in realm of business. Yet I'm seeing reports praising Pinterest for being proactive. The onus is upon Pinterest not to violate copyright and not for sources to have to add a metadata tag to adapt to some startup's business model. This does not address the situation where an image comes from a service which does not currently allow you to set the tag (say Flickr) nor does it address what someone has to do when another startup with a different model comes along.
- storborg 15y ago> still a gnat in realm of business That hasn't been my experience on several modest content sites. Across the board Pinterest sends more traffic than Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.
- joshfraser 15y agototally depends on the site
- oldstrangers 15y agohttp://www.thefancy.com/ http://www.thefancy.com/, http://weheartit.com/ http://weheartit.com/, http://ffffound.com/ http://ffffound.com/ There are hundreds of sites like Pinterest. It's fundamentally how the internet works. A free exchange of information. If you don't want your copyrighted content on Pinterest, file a DMCA notice. imgur.com has more traffic (even more traffic than reddit) and almost no way to attribute content, yet no one is crying foul; all while imgur brings in significant amounts of money for other people's content. I don't see the difference. To take the nonsense further... Reddit makes tons of money providing links to other people's content (usually linked through imgur with no attribution). Google makes billions off advertising against other people's content, search results and copyrighted images. Where do you draw the line in the nonsense?
- shingen 15y agoIf that approach had been followed - onus on the company - there could have been no such thing as search engines on the scale of Google or Bing. Unless you like your search engine with a few million pages instead of a trillion. Much of the foundation of the content Web rests on the notion of asking forgiveness later (so to speak), rather than permission first.
- xelipe 15y agoI would hate to have to add a meta tag for each services... meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex" meta name="facebook" content="nolike" meta name="tumblr" content="noreblog" meta name="twitter" content="noretweet" ...
- downx3 15y agoThat's the first thing I thought of when reading the article. You can't expect each website owner to know every online service available on the web! What's a better way to deal with this then? Embedding copyright notices into your images? Having a COPYRIGHT.TXT file?
- LukaD 15y agoHow about <meta name="pinterest" content="dopin" />? Why would I want to put additional crap on my site if I wanted to opt out of this? An opt-in would be much better.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoBecause then you'd have to opt-in to Google Images, Reddit, HN, and a thousans other services as well, which of course you won't do, because it's a waste of time. Opt-in is not a way to go if you want to have anything done in the world.
- Tichy 15y agoDo they copy the images, or hotlink them? If they hotlink, some evil minds might come up with other "workarounds". No way I am going to add some meta tag just for pinterest. Not that I have anything I don't want to be shared yet, but still.