panamint_patty wrote:A Lawyer Who Is Also A Photographer Just Deleted All Her Pinterest Boards Out Of FearMore on Pinterest.
Kirsten turned to federal copyright laws and found a section on fair use. Copyrighted work can only be used without permission when someone is criticizing it, commenting on it, reporting on it, teaching about it, or conducting research. Repinning doesn't fall under any of those categories. The one glimmer of hope for Pinterest, Kirsten writes, is the outcome of Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation. In that case, a photographer sued a search engine. The search engine won because it used thumbnail images in its results, not the entire work. Thumbnails aren't always fair use, however. They're only fair use if the necessary portion of the work is copied and nothing more. Pinterest, however, lifts the entire image from the original source which is not ok. If that didn't scare Kirsten enough, the all caps section of Pinterest's Terms of Use did.
LINK:
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image
Not knowing how Pinterest operates, I can only speculate, but in general if Pinterest makes a copy of an image and displays it without the permission of the person who owns the photograph then copyright laws have been violated. However, merely displaying the image on your website does not violate copyright law providing that the image is not copied and the image is displayed through a reference to another website. COPYright law is violated only when a COPY is made. That may be a difficult concept for a lawyer who doesn't understand how the HTML img tag works to wrap his or her head around, but it's pretty plain and simple for someone who does. That being said, if Pinterest does make local copies of an image, it is liable for breaking copyright law if users submit references to an image and Pinterest then makes copies of the image, BUT if users must upload the image, then the user is liable for breaking the copyright law. Since I don't use Pinterest, I don't know what method is used and it's impossible to tell just by looking at the site since an image looks the same regardless of which method is used. The advantage of making a copy of an image is that you then control access to your copy of the image and don't have to worry about the owner making it inaccessible.