There’s been a lot of chatter about ethics and Pinterest recently. While following the discussion, I learned some surprising things about the copyright rules and legality.
I’ve been following a long conversation about the ethical responsibilities of Pinterest – how to pin, how to credit, but I hadn’t really thought about the legal implications until I read this from DDKPortraits. In short, Cold Brew Labs technically owns the copyright to anything you pin. You can be held liable for anything you pin that you don’t have rights to and anything you do they can use. (if you want more legal details, definitely check out the link).
I find this particularly interesting since Pinterest is the new big thing for companies. Everyone wants to be on Pinterest, being re-pinned over and over. It makes sense – it’s really good, free publicity right now. But for companies that are so paranoid about intellectual property, it seems odd. It epitomizes the issues that companies have sometimes with social media – they’re so desperate to be there and using it that they don’t think it all or even some of the way through. Notably, smaller places/individual artisans are thinking about these issues, so it’s even more of an oversight imho.
Pinterest is clearly aware of and interested in the use of it as a sales/influence tool with the release of Pinerly – a tool to track the influence and spread of pins. Pinterest also called DDKPortraits to get her suggestions after the linked post so it’s probably safe to assume that changes are to come. (which is awesome since I’d hate to have to delete my own boards).
Pinterest ethics to come on Wednesday. Until then, here’s some more links on the legal issues of Pinterest.
Pinterest editing pins for (their) profit
Aesthetic Snafu 
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