[OneBytePerGreen]

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]

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.

[Terretta]

"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."

That's why Flickr lets you search for Creative Commons images, for which the photographer gives you that personal use permission in advance.

[chives]

Never mind various sites which also offer public domain images as well. Then there is the 3rd choice of actually talking to the photographer. I have used original songs produced from a musician (with his written consent) and photos produced by a photographer (again with written consent) on websites I have made. Then again one is a good friend and the other is the future wife of another good friend of mine.

[js2]

There are shades of a grey between commercial use and free use which are unaddressed.

[Terretta]

You think so? I license photos through Creative Commons, and differently depending on the shades of personal to commercial I consider inherent in the potential market for a photo.

I find it covers all the shades of commerciality I've considered. Meanwhile, for a purely commercial photographer, the getty images option is there, and those won't come up in the Creative Commons search unless licensed appropriately.

The CC search tool on Flickr is a fantastic tool for finding photos of the exact "shade" of use you're looking for.

[js2]

CC photos are all free for non-commercial use, correct? What if you'd like to be compensated, but not at rates that justify the overhead of Getty Images? Many of the images I found were not CC licensed, nor did they have a Getty Images option. Those are the images I'm referring to.

e.g., go search Flickr for "drawdy falls". No results in Getty, no results in the Commons, but a handful of images from photographers that are retaining full copyright, but have't posted contact info. Maybe they don't want compensation and just failed to select CC when they posted. Who knows. Regardless, many of the images I found were in this middle ground. I'm not trying to sound entitled here, just pointing out that there's lots of images that sadly cannot be used.

[briandon]

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]

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.

[cbr]

You can make the requests in parallel; it's one week total, not "a week for each image".

[jtheory]

It's probably a bigger problem that it was going to cost him $3000 to send those 30 postcards (postage not included).

Getty is clearly defaulting to "I want to use this image in an advertisement" or similar uses, NOT a one-off single print of an image, to be "displayed" to a single person audience. $100 per image is ridiculous for that.

[pbhjpbhj]

The requests are serial, the delay is parallelised. Or is there really a multi-request system?

[andylei]

> There should be an easier way to remunerate the photographer, and at more reasonable prices

does anybody know of a site that allows this?

[anothermachine]

Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling.

[elithrar]

> 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.

[_delirium]

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.

[timdorr]

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 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]

Exactly, the onus should be upon Pinterest not Flickr.

[mlinsey]

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/

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]

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]

But part of the complaint against MegaUpload was that they were not complying with DMCA takedowns.

[lubujackson]

"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]

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

[bobzimuta]

  30%+ of its images are flickr images...

What's the source for this?

[user-id]

Thin air, surely.