I have seen the re-blog of Christine Bohn's post on Pinterest several times with many responses from "WOW" to "is that breaking the law?"
Pinterest is basically like Facebook with the difference being you only post links. Organize a few "boards" with topics you like, i.e. "favorite recipes", "home decor" etc.. then when you find a site with something you love, you attach the link to that board so that others that follow you can see what you like. If you like it enough, you are basically sharing it with others in the Pinterest world.
How is this any different than Facebook? Millions of links, videos, pictures, graphics and sayings are "Shared" and re-shared daily. If I sent a cool quote I came up with out into the world and it went viral and was shared a million times, I can't imagine I would have any recourse in suing someone for copyright law infringement.
Pinterest is not designed for passing something off as yourself or created by you UNLESS, in fact, YOU created it and uploaded it from your website. IF you do, I suppose you agree to the fact that it MAY be re-pinned over and over. That's not really the RISK, it's the GOAL. You want your items or things re-pinned. Each re-pinning gives a link back to the original post, page, site or source so I am not sure how this could be construed as breaking copyright laws.
Pinterest has stated that they don't want you copying and pasting entire dissertations from websites and passing them off as your own and Pinterest Etiquette states that the whole objective is to credit the source.
So, I am assuming, unless you unlawfully copied something from the Internet (like an image) saved it to your computer, then pinned it as your own, THAT would be considered copyright infringement. Simply posting a link to the image would do nothing but benefit the original site with a link back for them.
Am I wrong? Missing something here? Or should we just let go and Pin away!?
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