e-richard wrote:In a nutshell:
If you care about copyright, do not share photos.
If you want to share, then Pinterest is a great vehicle.
Pinterest, like Facebook, is all about sharing. Its not about protecting copyright.
Facebook is incredibly successful because millions of people do not care about copyright.
Neither of these (and a huge swathe of new thinking social networking/sharing websites) are suitable for or aimed at professional photographers or designers. That's what Getty Images and that ilk are about.
Richard, you paint an over the rainbow 'www' where everybody does what they want and nobody ever gets hurt. Share photographs that you find on the internet with your mates on social networking sites. Or go the 'Getty Images and that ilk' route by protecting your images behind a copyright wall. Problem is that it isn't working - copyright material is being stolen on an unprecedented scale, encouraged by sites like Pinterest and others. The three biggest pictures agencies - Getty, Corbis and Alamy - all report having their stock pictures 'pinned'. Several of my professional colleagues report hundreds of new abuses every week. All metadata that identifies the author is usually stripped from these images and they become public property.
If you're a professional photographer, it's not 'Oh shucks, it's just the kids having fun and a little bit of extra exposure for me'. Images are being stolen in a vast tsunami. If I can't protect my images with copyright, I can't sell them to legitimate clients because the licences that I issue with 'exclusivity' will be worthless. Imagine, Richard, if hundreds of people downloaded and shared your PIMS Management System without payment and it proved impossible to protect your property and hard-won expertise - how would you feel?
It's possible that a legal challenge to Pinterest (and Amazon, who are storing and publishing Pinterest images without the copyright holder's permission on their servers) will happen or the company (now under some pressure) may decide voluntarily to change its ways. But it will surely be replaced by dozens of new networking sites eager to learn from their experience.
In a nutshell: If you regularly lift images from the internet to 'share' with your friends without the permission of the copyright owner, don't expect any sympathy or support when somebody lifts chunks of your creative output on your own website. What you sow ...
Yes, I wondered how you would react to that article Jimbo. When I first read it I thought "he must have independent means!"
I didn't think this could be done - so watermarks don't work then Jimbo?