[billpatrianakos]

It's one thing to find something truly damning in a TOS and something else entirely to nitpick standard boilerplate legalese meant to protect companies from the very same people who nitpick the TOS in the first place.

I know it's cool to be contrarian around here but give me a break. Look at this like a human, not a robot, and you'll see this is a mountain made out of a mole hill. Not saying you in particular are looking at this like a robot, I was speaking in general there.

[__alexs]

> It's one thing to find something truly damning in a TOS and something else entirely to nitpick standard boilerplate legalese meant to protect companies from the very same people who nitpick the TOS in the first place.

If "we have non-exclusive rights to use and sell everything you post on our site and you take all responsibility if infringement does occur" is now "standard boilerplate legalese" then actually yes I do think people should be complaining, and not just at Pinterest.

I suppose ultimately they could be going for the YouTube style model of stimulating large amounts of infringement, and then making DMCA compliance easy, but also offering content owners the ability to profit from advertising along side that originally infringing content.

I don't think that model is inherently a bad thing, but it can make life very tedious for users and for smaller content producers so people should know what they are getting into. The history of YouTube monetization has been a total mess for a lot of people, and it seems to regularly go through new rounds of turmoil as they tweak their algorithms or more aggressive content owners join the market.

[lwat]

If we never complain about these things they'll never get fixed.

[billpatrianakos]

Do they get fixed though? If we don't pick our battles we run the risk of being seen as a bunch of whiners and being written off as such. Do these things need fixing? Is it the TOS that need fixing or is it the conditions under which such agreements are made necessary that need fixing. Maybe we're focusing our efforts in the wrong place.

[Terretta]

Forget copyright for a moment.

When their ToS says "Pin your own content here", then says, "Thank you, now we can do anything we want to with it, including sell it," that's going too far.

That would be like Flickr claiming they (not you) had the right to sell your photos. Or Rackspace claiming they had the right to sell anything you posted on your web site.

This ToS is an extreme overreach, and your casual dismissal of that extremity is itself cautionary -- what can happen when one becomes too saturated with the 70+ hours of ToS reading a typical Internet user would have to do each year to keep up.

[jasonlotito]

> "Thank you, now we can do anything we want to with it, including sell it,"

If this part (obviously this isn't the exact phrasing) was removed, then they wouldn't have the right to serve your content on their site. They couldn't use a screenshot containing your content in any advertising they did. They couldn't use your content alongside advertising. They couldn't do a lot of things they do now.

Allowing someone to upload something doesn't inherently give you any rights to use that content. If you remove the parts you are complaining about, then they can't do anything that they are doing.

[lwat]

'Aait, you put your effort where you think is best, and leave us to pursue what we think is important.