-
Pinterest and Copyright: So Why All the Fuss?
March 21, 2012 by Rick Sanders | Category: Blawg, Blog | Tags: consumer-technology disconnect, copyright, DMCA, graphic design, internet, photograph, Pinterest, safe-harbor, social media
Part 2 (of 2): Welcome Nice Pinterest Users to the Bizarro World of Copyright and the Internet!
Last time, we took stock of the recent kerfuffle about Pinterest, copyright and Pinterest’s Terms of Use (“TOU”), and we even looked at those horrifying, normal TOU. In this post, I want to step back and answer two basic questions: Should Pinterest users really worry about being sued for copyright infringement? And is there really something to all this fuss?
I’ll preface the rest of what I’m going to say by emphasizing that, although I’m a lawyer in this field (i.e., copyright and the internet), I’m not giving you legal advice here. A lot of this is reasoned speculation, but I could turn out to be wrong, and I don’t know your specific legal situation and speak to it. OK?
Is Someone Really Going to Sue Nice Pinterest Users?
How much should you worry if you’re using Pinterest? I suspect you don’t have that much to worry about. Unlike Napster, Pinterest isn’t threatening an entire livelihood here. Flickr has already done all the damage the internet is going to do to professional photographers, in a perfectly legal manner, by … Read More»
-
Pinterest and Copyright: Everyone Just Take a Nice Deep Breath
Part 1 (of 2): Teacup in a Tempest
So, here I was all ready to write a post about how everyone should just stop freaking out about Pinterest’s terms of use (“TOU”), when someone tweeted this excellent piece from the Copyright Librarian (updated here) that basically makes all the points I was going to make. And lots of other people have been making all kinds of other points about Pinterest, copyright and terms of use. Is that going to stop me from writing about Pinterest? Of course not!
The Pinterest kerfuffle started a couple of weeks ago with several articles about a lawyer–not a copyright lawyer, but a good, solid lawyer–who (1) is a photographer and (2) actually read Pinterest’s TOU. In tears (a perfectly natural reaction from reading any TOU), she took down her Pinterest account. This generated a good deal of interest across the Internet, including from Pinterest’s CEO–and, alas, a good deal of legal misinformation.
Nipping it in the Bud
We’ll focus on the article in Business Insider article that “broke” the story (as opposed to the original blog post). What happened was that the lawyer/photographer posted a blog entry about how … Read More»
