As you may know, I’m a photographer who licenses stock imagery. This license that someone buys, allows them to use a certain image in a certain way. However, there is a large group out there on internet who may be using my and others’ images illegally, so I wanted to discuss image usage on blogs today.
My business is licensing creative imagery to designers and other buyers that need content for their work. I don’t “sell pictures” – what stock photographers do is create a license, a set of terms, that grants certain rights to another to use a piece of content. Now, licenses to use my work are not free, despite the misleading catch-all title of “royalty free” for this general style of licensing. The royalties I receive for my work supports my business and […]
I haven’t been keeping a strong eye on the Pinterest copyright infringement situation lately, having a bunch of stock shoots and other work to do. However, yesterday, it popped back up on my radar when one of my earlier comments was quoted on Mashable.com:
I’ve been following a few threads on the net that I’ve found that have linked to my various articles on Pinterest and the copyright issues it faces. One of them led to a discussion on Linked In, which I joined. One poster mentioned that Pinterest usage is “fair use” and isn’t doing any damage, since they aren’t making any money off of the “pinned” image. I disagreed, and the poster mentioned a specific business and that Pinterest “is a wonderful […]
Apparently, all the discussion about Pinterest and copyright has caught the attention of the company higher-ups over there. Last Wednesday, I mentioned that by putting a special meta tag in the header of the html for a page, Pinterest would disallow pinning by their bookmarklet. I thought this was something that I had originally missed while scanning through their help documentation. However, it seems like this was actually a new attempt (along with a 500 character limit on comments) to […]
In reading comments on other blogs about the Pinterest copyright problem, one of the things that people are taking issue with is poor “pinning etiquette”, one facet of which is not “pinning” to the original source image so that the original artist gets credit and a link. Again, credit and/or a link is not a way to get around copyright infringement. If you have the desire to use someone’s image on your blog, you should secure the proper license/permission to […]
We’ve been talking about Pinterest, and by extension, all the wave of “___board” sites, like Juxtapost.com . One additional problem occurred to me today, as I was reading comments on a blog post about using Pinterest to promote non-profit groups. I think, up until this point, I’ve been pointing out that “pinning” images to these sites merely infringes copyright of the, usually, unwilling, original artist. However, what if the content is not merely being used for a “I love this” […]
The issue of Pinterest’s continued copyright infringement is spreading to blogs across the web. Here are some more articles on the issue. I was trying to come up with ways Pinterest could appear like it cares about the rights of the artists it is currently infringing upon. One thought was to require that site owners submit their website to Pinterest for indexing as a sign of “permission” and then Pinterest users could browse submitted imagery for “inspiration”. The “Napster” author […]
Keeping out of trouble when licensing content.
Terms of Service from several sites are examined for fairness.
