Are You Stealing Money From Artists By Pinning to Pinterest?

Although the simple act of pinning a photo to your pinboard may seem unimportant, it can easily hurt the original creator's chances of earning money from it. There are three main ways this can happen (although there are probably many more):

• Once the photo you pinned on your board is indexed by Google, the image will display in Google image search. Since Pinterest is a larger site than the average blog or personal site, it will rank higher in the image search than the original picture, meaning that the original picture will often get far less traffic.
• Images can be imbedded into other sites. If those sites earn money from the pages where those photos are displayed, they are making money from them without any of that revenue returning in any form to the original image creator.
• If you visit a site where the author has taken a photo from elsewhere, with correct attribution, you are still not correctly attributing. You are providing a link to the author of the article, not to the original artist. The only way to avoid this is to go to the original artist's work.

1. If the photo is from a personal blog, the blog writer may prefer that their family photos stay private or at least where they can be aware of their context or re-use.
2. If the photo is usually sold on some type of payment scheme (such as paid stock photos), you may be setting yourself up for legal trouble.
3. You could be breaking the Terms of Use which you agreed to when joining Pinterest. 
4. You may have a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) filed against you for illegal use of photos.
5. How would you feel if someone linked to images or writing that you owned, without asking your permission?

When you signed up for Pinterest, did you read the Terms & Conditions (Terms of Use)? Yes, that huge and annoying page of legal jargon, which most people just click Agree on. Well maybe you should have. 

According to the Pinterest Terms of Use (Some parts removed for convenience):

You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services........ you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary........... neither the Member Content nor your posting, uploading, publication, submission or transmittal of the Member Content or Cold Brew Labs’ use of the Member Content (or any portion thereof) on, through or by means of the Site, Application and the Services will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other proprietary or intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation.

There are plenty of photos that you can legally pin. Just make sure they fall under the following categories:

• Labelled for reuse, creative commons or in the public domain.
• Images you have asked the creator for permission to pin.
• Images specifically made for Pinterest.
• Images you have created yourself.

• The Pinterest Terms of Use.
• A photographer's view on repinning photos to Pinterest.
• Comments by another photographer.
• And more in depth information on the topic here and here.

Feel free to pin any images on this page.