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Pinterest has a market valuation of > 200 million dollars... 30%+ of its images are flickr images... ... 99%+ of which are "All Rights Reserved". How many .

Pinterest has a market valuation of > 200 million dollars... 30%+ of its images are flickr images... ... 99%+ of which are "All Rights Reserved". How many ... page views, ... new subscribers, ... and $$$ have the most-pinned flickr images generated for pinterest, with the author not seeing a single cent... not even having the satisfaction of seeing their popularity on pinterest reflect in their flickr stats? And: Pinterest does not even have the decency to display the author name and license info next to the image. Pinterest's business model is flawed; it is based on systematic violation of copyright. At some point, someone will start a class-action lawsuit and invite flickr photographers whose works got "pinned" to sign up, to reclaim part of that >$200 million pie. In fact, this seems like a valid startup idea to me: Create a one-page website explaining to flickr users what has been going on. Do a systematic reverse image search to find out which authors have been affected and invite them to join. Arrange with an interested lawfirm to get a % of their fee in exchange for delivering the list of potential plaintiffs.

js2 15y ago
Recently, I wanted to make some picture postcards of various locations around the US for personal use, so I went looking for images. I found many on Flickr. I wanted to compensate the original photographer. There is no easy way to do this. At best, some photographs have a "request to license" link that bounces you to a third party (typically Getty Images) which offers to "Review the photo to determine if it's a good fit for licensing through us; Contact the photographer; Handle the details like releases and pricing" and takes "between two and seven days to arrange licensing." with prices typically around $100 for usable resolution for a postcard. At worst, you have to sign in to Yahoo so that you can send the photographer a message about wanting to use their photo. You may or may not get a reply, and you have to arrange how to pay the photographer, if at all. This may make sense for images which are to be used in a commercial context, but for personal use like how I wanted to use the images, it's way too expensive and much too much friction. The vast majority of images will never be used commercially. There should be an easier way to remunerate the photographer, and at more reasonable prices. A "Pix Store" if you will. Maybe that's what the stock photo sites are supposed to be, but they don't have nearly the inventory. Sorry for the tangent.
- anothermachine 15y ago
  Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Yeah, in general stuff like Getty Images is intended to license redistribution of the photo: if you plan to sell or give away hundreds of post cards, or use the photo on your website, or something else. It's pretty uncommon to license photos that you just want to print out at home for private use. To me that's more akin to saving a photo and making it your desktop wallpaper.
  - elithrar 15y ago
    > Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling. Just because the photographer has one image for sale, it does not mean he is selling (or giving you the rights to distribute/copy) another image.
- briandon 15y ago
  The Getty Images process doesn't sound too terrible to me. Is the up-to-a-week wait partly a consequence of GI giving the photog a chance to approve/deny the request? That would be reasonable -- they might not want, for example, a Neo-Nazi group licensing their photo of blonde, blue-eyed kids for some sort of racist poster campaign. Also, $100 licensing for a photo that you really love is cheap as chips. By personal use, do you mean that you were literally going to produce one copy of each postcard and keep them all yourself? You weren't going to make multiple copies and give/send any to anyone else?
  - js2 15y ago
    I was making a single postcard per image, and needed a total of 30 separate images. These were going to a family member (30 postcards from 30 locations for her 30th birthday). Having to wait a week for each image, and pay $100 each, wasn't going to work. For personal use such as this it'd be nice if there were an easier way. Maybe Flickr could even be the middle man and take a 30% cut.
timdorr 15y ago
To be fair, Flickr has implemented the ability to opt out of "pinning" via a setting: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/sharing?from=privacy http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/sharing?from=privacy This adds the "nopin" meta tag to your pages automatically. However, to be even more fair, the burden was on Flickr to implement this, not Pinterest. Pinterest is still encouraging copyright violation.
- newman314 15y ago
  Exactly, the onus should be upon Pinterest not Flickr.
mlinsey 15y ago
Flickr enables their users to mark their images as not-sharable, which now includes disabling anyone from sharing the images on Pinterest: http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/24/flickr-pinterest-pin/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/24/flickr-pinterest-pin/ Legally (IANAL but my understanding is), Pinterest only needs to comply with DMCA takedown requests. Instead they are being proactive and allow people to tag images as "nopin", vastly reducing the need for tedious or unreliable monitoring of Pinterest for copyrighted content, as content owners must do for almost every other sharing site. That's a good thing, and they should be applauded for it. I suspect you might dislike the opt-out vs. opt-in nature of the nopin system, but new technologies have been accused of facilitating the death of copyright ever since the invention of the radio, but it turned out that most of those inventions created a lot of value for the world and for creators who adapt to the new medium.
- moe 15y ago
  Legally [...] Pinterest only needs to comply with DMCA takedown requests. That didn't work out so well for MegaUpload. But then again, pinterest probably doesn't have a strong lobby working against it.
  - marshray 15y ago
    But part of the complaint against MegaUpload was that they were not complying with DMCA takedowns.
bobzimuta 15y ago
30%+ of its images are flickr images... What's the source for this?
- user-id 15y ago
  Thin air, surely.
lubujackson 15y ago
"Pinterest's business model is flawed; it is based on systematic violation of copyright." I don't think you've taken a look around the internet. Many successes are dependent on breaking or at least challenging the outdated concept of copyright, and many further successes were simply the latest new thing that incrementally improved the copyright situation (basically every music startup from Napster to Spotify). Even search engines (or ESPECIALLY search engines) are in a deeply gray area of copyright law and have never fully challenged the fuzziness of copyright law. And maybe it's worth considering how much value is gained by everyone if there are weaker copyright restrictions and punishments. In Pinterest's case, they could always make their system load the images directly from the source website. I'm sure they considered that and rejected it because it would make everything much slower and cause issues when sites go down or switch images, but that's precisely what Google Images does when you click on a thumbnail. What's the real difference here?
justincormack 15y ago
Pinterest should buy Flickr to resolve this, then it would need to copy and would legitimise large parts of its content.

js2 15y ago

Recently, I wanted to make some picture postcards of various locations around the US for personal use, so I went looking for images. I found many on Flickr. I wanted to compensate the original photographer. There is no easy way to do this. At best, some photographs have a "request to license" link that bounces you to a third party (typically Getty Images) which offers to "Review the photo to determine if it's a good fit for licensing through us; Contact the photographer; Handle the details like releases and pricing" and takes "between two and seven days to arrange licensing." with prices typically around $100 for usable resolution for a postcard. At worst, you have to sign in to Yahoo so that you can send the photographer a message about wanting to use their photo. You may or may not get a reply, and you have to arrange how to pay the photographer, if at all. This may make sense for images which are to be used in a commercial context, but for personal use like how I wanted to use the images, it's way too expensive and much too much friction. The vast majority of images will never be used commercially. There should be an easier way to remunerate the photographer, and at more reasonable prices. A "Pix Store" if you will. Maybe that's what the stock photo sites are supposed to be, but they don't have nearly the inventory. Sorry for the tangent.

anothermachine 15y ago
Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Yeah, in general stuff like Getty Images is intended to license redistribution of the photo: if you plan to sell or give away hundreds of post cards, or use the photo on your website, or something else. It's pretty uncommon to license photos that you just want to print out at home for private use. To me that's more akin to saving a photo and making it your desktop wallpaper.
- elithrar 15y ago
  > Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling. Just because the photographer has one image for sale, it does not mean he is selling (or giving you the rights to distribute/copy) another image.
briandon 15y ago
The Getty Images process doesn't sound too terrible to me. Is the up-to-a-week wait partly a consequence of GI giving the photog a chance to approve/deny the request? That would be reasonable -- they might not want, for example, a Neo-Nazi group licensing their photo of blonde, blue-eyed kids for some sort of racist poster campaign. Also, $100 licensing for a photo that you really love is cheap as chips. By personal use, do you mean that you were literally going to produce one copy of each postcard and keep them all yourself? You weren't going to make multiple copies and give/send any to anyone else?
- js2 15y ago
  I was making a single postcard per image, and needed a total of 30 separate images. These were going to a family member (30 postcards from 30 locations for her 30th birthday). Having to wait a week for each image, and pay $100 each, wasn't going to work. For personal use such as this it'd be nice if there were an easier way. Maybe Flickr could even be the middle man and take a 30% cut.

timdorr 15y ago

To be fair, Flickr has implemented the ability to opt out of "pinning" via a setting: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/sharing?from=privacy http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/sharing?from=privacy This adds the "nopin" meta tag to your pages automatically. However, to be even more fair, the burden was on Flickr to implement this, not Pinterest. Pinterest is still encouraging copyright violation.

newman314 15y ago
Exactly, the onus should be upon Pinterest not Flickr.

mlinsey 15y ago

Flickr enables their users to mark their images as not-sharable, which now includes disabling anyone from sharing the images on Pinterest: http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/24/flickr-pinterest-pin/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/24/flickr-pinterest-pin/ Legally (IANAL but my understanding is), Pinterest only needs to comply with DMCA takedown requests. Instead they are being proactive and allow people to tag images as "nopin", vastly reducing the need for tedious or unreliable monitoring of Pinterest for copyrighted content, as content owners must do for almost every other sharing site. That's a good thing, and they should be applauded for it. I suspect you might dislike the opt-out vs. opt-in nature of the nopin system, but new technologies have been accused of facilitating the death of copyright ever since the invention of the radio, but it turned out that most of those inventions created a lot of value for the world and for creators who adapt to the new medium.

moe 15y ago
Legally [...] Pinterest only needs to comply with DMCA takedown requests. That didn't work out so well for MegaUpload. But then again, pinterest probably doesn't have a strong lobby working against it.
- marshray 15y ago
  But part of the complaint against MegaUpload was that they were not complying with DMCA takedowns.

bobzimuta 15y ago

30%+ of its images are flickr images... What's the source for this?

user-id 15y ago
Thin air, surely.

lubujackson 15y ago

"Pinterest's business model is flawed; it is based on systematic violation of copyright." I don't think you've taken a look around the internet. Many successes are dependent on breaking or at least challenging the outdated concept of copyright, and many further successes were simply the latest new thing that incrementally improved the copyright situation (basically every music startup from Napster to Spotify). Even search engines (or ESPECIALLY search engines) are in a deeply gray area of copyright law and have never fully challenged the fuzziness of copyright law. And maybe it's worth considering how much value is gained by everyone if there are weaker copyright restrictions and punishments. In Pinterest's case, they could always make their system load the images directly from the source website. I'm sure they considered that and rejected it because it would make everything much slower and cause issues when sites go down or switch images, but that's precisely what Google Images does when you click on a thumbnail. What's the real difference here?

justincormack 15y ago

Pinterest should buy Flickr to resolve this, then it would need to copy and would legitimise large parts of its content.