Pinterest….Oh, No!

I love Pinterest. I am a Pinterest junkie. I can sit and look at the amazing photos for far longer than I should. For the last several weeks I have been seeing this pin pop up on lots of boards:

Hmmm. I know I did not carefully read the pages of small print under “Terms of Use” when I signed up for my Pinterest account, so I decided to click through and find the original pin for this message and what I read really concerned me.

If you have pinned a photo that is not yours, you can be sued for copyright enfringement. If you repin a photo that is not yours, you can be sued for copyright enfringement. (What? Isn’t that the whole idea?) If you pin one of your own photos onto a board, it becomes the property of Pinterest. They now own it and control it.

Wait? What? I thought the whole idea was to share ideas. Click a photo of food and it takes you to the original website so you can copy the recipe. Awesome. Click a photo of a craft project and it takes you to the original website so you can see the tutorial for making it yourself. Awesome.

Unfortunately, copyright enfringement has become a monster for Pinterest. The message I read included a link that you could use to check to see if any of your photos have been pinned without your permission. I clicked the link and I was shocked to see several dozen of my photos from Flickr and many photos from this blog pinned on boards without crediting me as the originator of the photos. Two of the pinners credited my work as being their own.

So, if you do not want others pinning your Flickr photos, go to your Privacy Settings and next to the “Allow others to share your stuff” button, click “No Pin.” This will prevent others from using your photos. The only way to get credit for your blog photos is to watermark them before you post them. From now on, I will be very selective about what I pin!