[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 Many successes are dependent on breaking or at least challenging the outdated concept of copyright, and many further successes were simply the latest new thing that incrementally improved the copyright situation (basically every music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?