Can WordPress staff help me to stop Pinterest users from pinning my images?
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Can WordPress staff help me to stop Pinterest users from pinning images from my site? I’m aware of two methods:
1. Insert nopin=”nopin” tag before the closing bracket on each image.
2. Add the following line to your header below the <head> tag and above the <title> tag.<meta name=”pinterest”content=”nopin” />
The first option can presumably be applied from here on, but imagine adding it to 9,000 images already embedded on your site. That’s the task that awaits me. The second option evidently requires access to an area that free WordPress.com account users cannot visit. It’s not clear to me whether this is available to WordPress.com users with a Custom CSS upgrade, or whether it’s only available to those with self-hosted blogs (WordPress.org users).
I don’t want Pinterest users to pin images copied from my site. Here’s why:
Pinterest employs its legions of pin-mad users to effectively steal my image traffic by diverting it to itself. On a Google search of “Songbook1.WordPress” the majority of the top results are images from Songbook redirected toward Pinterest. In this manner, Pinterest is credited daily for perhaps hundreds of pageviews I’ve worked for, and should be receiving credit for.
While Pinterest claims they help send traffic to the sources of the images (blogs and websites) that their users “pin,” and this may be true for a short periods, it appears obvious that the site ultimately reduces traffic to the sources by, with Google’s help, causing it to be redirected as described above. Example: On 9 November, I received exactly two referrals from Pinterest, accounting for roughly 1/6th of 1% of my pageviews for the day. It’s clear that many times that number of pageviews are lost each day by Pinterest receiving credit for my images. They get credit because Pinterest obviously has an enormously great volume of traffic, AND Google is unable to detect, or unprepared to identify and credit the original sources of image found on Pinterest.
Pinterest does provide a link to the source of any image “pinned” by a registered user, but the user is under no obligation to use the link. Registered Pinterest users and visitors alike can freely view, copy, and share a full-size image, copied from your site or mine and “pinned” without permission on any Pinterest account, without ever visiting the source.
I’ve got image galleries which took dozens of hours to assemble, over a series of months or years: days and weeks spent searching for, identifying, acquiring, and photo-editing images. Pinterest is insidiously acquiring an ever-increasing percentage of the pageview credit awarded to Google search hits on images from my site. At the current rate it won’t be long until Pinterest, and other similar operations, control the pageview value of every one of the 9,000 or so images published on my site.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I found the answer to one of my questions in the WordPress Custom Design> Custom CSS support page (http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/custom-css/):
Does Custom Design let me edit HTML?
No. Custom Design allows you to add or replace CSS for WordPress.com themes; it does not give you access to change HTML markup or PHP code.The code <meta name=”pinterest”content=”nopin” /> is to be inserted as a “meta tag” in the header or <head> section of your HTML page.
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Hi there,
I completely understand your frustration with traffic that would be going to your site being directed to Pinterest instead. We don’t currently have a way to add that Pinterest meta tag to disable pinning, but I’ll forward the suggestion to our team so they can consider adding it in the future.
For now, I’d recommend using the other method Pinterest suggests to prevent an image from being pinned. You can also follow some of the steps in our guide to Prevent Content Theft, such as watermarking your images with your site’s address, to encourage anyone who sees the image somewhere else (like on Pinterest) to visit your site.
I hope this helps! Please let me know if there’s anything more I can do.
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rachelmcr,
Thanks. I’ll look into those options you suggest. I’m aware of them, but haven’t yet implemented any such defensive measures.
Corrected paragraph from my first post:
They get credit because Pinterest obviously has an enormously greater volume of traffic, AND Google is unable to detect, or unprepared to identify and credit the original sources of images found on Pinterest.
There are many good articles out there on the issues of image theft, and reposting (of which “pinning” is an example). I’ll provide some links here if people show interest. Some who’ve written on the issues involved have made important distinctions between “reposting” and “reblogging.” A good summary of some of reasons why reposting is wrong comes from blogger anothermindpalace in an article titled “Reblog Not Repost!: A Masterpost” in the blog Reposting is Stealing (@ Tumblr). An excerpt:
So recently I found the need to make a post like this. To explain what reposting is, why it is wrong and what you can do about it. I’ve found, a lot of people don’t really know that. Or maybe they just don’t want to know. Anyway, I still felt the need to make this. So let’s do it.
First things first.
“Wat is reposting?”
Reposting is when you take an image, art work, graphic, gif… that isn’t yours (Read as; not made, edited, created… by you) and upload it onto your own account. Simple as that.
Now, a more prominent question.
“Why is reposting wrong?”
There are many reasons to why this is wrong. Reasons different for every person, reason people often don’t see as a reason to why this is wrong. Let me list a few.
- You take away credit from the original poster.
- It is no sign of respect to any artist.
- The same image turns up over and over again in a tag, which is really annoying.
- People assume you edited/created the art you uploaded, the original creator gets no credit.
- The no credit thing is really a thing to keep in mind.
- A lot of work was put into it, even if it is just a gif. Even when it appears as a simple edit to you. People do these things because they want to. Because they like it. Because they feel the need to contribute something to the fandom they are in. And maybe even because they want some recognition and notes. For you to take all of that away, is simply rude and disrespectful.
- It actually counts as copyright violation. Something people often forget is a ‘crime.’ I’ll go into this later on in this post.
I hope anothermindpalace isn’t bothered by my lengthy quote.
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Ouch. What happened to the end quote on the correction of the paragraph from my first post? Let’s try that again. I hope someone can delete my last post.
rachelmcr,
Thanks. I’ll look into those options you suggest. I’m aware of them, but haven’t yet implemented any such defensive measures.
Corrected paragraph from my first post:
They get credit because Pinterest obviously has an enormously greater volume of traffic, AND Google is unable to detect, or unprepared to identify and credit the original sources of images found on Pinterest.
There are many good articles out there on the issues of image theft, and reposting (of which “pinning” is an example). I’ll provide some links here if people show interest. Some who’ve written on the issues involved have made important distinctions between “reposting” and “reblogging.” A good summary of some of reasons why reposting is wrong comes from blogger anothermindpalace in an article titled “Reblog Not Repost!: A Masterpost” in the blog Reposting is Stealing (@ Tumblr). An excerpt:
So recently I found the need to make a post like this. To explain what reposting is, why it is wrong and what you can do about it. I’ve found, a lot of people don’t really know that. Or maybe they just don’t want to know. Anyway, I still felt the need to make this. So let’s do it.
First things first.
“Wat is reposting?”
Reposting is when you take an image, art work, graphic, gif… that isn’t yours (Read as; not made, edited, created… by you) and upload it onto your own account. Simple as that.
Now, a more prominent question.
“Why is reposting wrong?”
There are many reasons to why this is wrong. Reasons different for every person, reason people often don’t see as a reason to why this is wrong. Let me list a few.
- You take away credit from the original poster.
- It is no sign of respect to any artist.
- The same image turns up over and over again in a tag, which is really annoying.
- People assume you edited/created the art you uploaded, the original creator gets no credit.
- The no credit thing is really a thing to keep in mind.
- A lot of work was put into it, even if it is just a gif. Even when it appears as a simple edit to you. People do these things because they want to. Because they like it. Because they feel the need to contribute something to the fandom they are in. And maybe even because they want some recognition and notes. For you to take all of that away, is simply rude and disrespectful.
- It actually counts as copyright violation. Something people often forget is a ‘crime.’ I’ll go into this later on in this post.
I hope anothermindpalace isn’t bothered by my lengthy quote.
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Again? Now I forgot to include the links to the blogger and the article:
The above summary of some of the reasons why reposting is wrong is quoted from an article by blogger anothermindpalace titled “Reblog Not Repost!: A Masterpost” in the blog Reposting Is Stealing (@ Tumblr). -
I don’t why you are posting all that faff above. The allegations that pinning images does not credit the copyright holders of the images are untrue.
Are the images on your site your own images ie. are they under your copyright? They sure don’t look like they are to me.
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The allegations that pinning images does not credit the copyright holders of the images are untrue.
I presume you mean the line “People assume you edited/created the art you uploaded, the original creator gets no credit. ” from the quoted article. I didn’t write that, and should have used more discretion in the portion of the article quote. Pinterest credits the source of an uploaded image, but I don’t see any evidence that they make any effort to determine who owns the copyright to the image. That’s not my principle gripe, however, because, as you suggested, I don’t normally search for copyrights either, though I try to credit the original photographer and copyright owner when that information is available without great effort.
The large gulf between what I do and what Pinterest does lies in two major differences:
1. Pinterest has an extremely high volume of traffic. My site has relatively small traffic volume, a small fraction of 1% of their traffic. From Wikipedia:For January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark.
In contrast in my best month, November 2012, I had 54, 580 page views, less than 1/2 of 1% of the figure cited for Pinterest for January 2012. They have continued to grow since then, while my site has been in decline since the late 2012 peak increasing the divide between our respective volumes (though Songbook has had a little spurt of growth early this month which I don’t expect to last.).
2. Pinterest has grown rapidly to become a tremendous aggregate of users who by their actions (pinning) regularly promote the site so that other bloggers are encouraged to join in the mass pinning fervor leading to more growth. I have one user, myself, and no real expectation of growing into a two user blog.
From Wikipedia again:
In February 2013, Reuters and ComScore stated that Pinterest had 48.7 million users globally. A study released in July 2013 by French social media agency Semiocast revealed the website had 70 million users worldwide.
Some are quick to defend Pinterest by comparing it favorably to Google Images. The two are not analogous.
From a HubPages article titled “Is Pinterest a Haven for Copyright Violations,” by Greekgeek:
Some people have defended Pinterest by comparing it to Google Image Search, but Google doesn’t store copies (and defended itself in a lawsuit on that basis).
Say you remove a photo from your own site in order to sell it. Or say you find a copy of your art posted illegally on someone else’s website and ask them to remove it. Once the image is removed, Google automatically drops it from search results, but Pinterest’s full-sized copy of the image remains.
Again, so what?
Well, for starters, a lot of traffic comes to blogs and photography websites by searching for pictures of things. If someone pins a photo on Pinterest, they’ve created a competing version of the image, which could siphon image search traffic away from the source site.
For example, I have seen traffic to some of my own online articles drop, after a pinboard using my photos started outranking the original article in Google. This has resulted in real, measurable loss of income for me.
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Are the images on your site your own images ie. are they taken by you and under your copyright? They sure don’t look like they are to me.
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I don’t mean to encourage “reblogging” either. I had misunderstood the meaning of that term.
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@musicdoc1
We can’t prevent reblogging as anyone with a WordPress.COM/gravatar account can reblog our posts. Reblogging results in a propelry attributed backlink.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/reblogs/re: Pinterest image pinning
So let me get this straight please. Is it true that the images you use on your own blog are not under your copyright, and that they are the images that you are complaining about being pinned by Pinterest users? A simple yes or no answer will suffice. -
This is what I see in Google’s image cache for your site
I’m not loading your site because this speed test tells me all I need to know about how long it will take to load it. Your website is slower than 93% of all tested websites http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dzwbpv/http://songbook1.wordpress.com/
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I already answered your question, above. I believe that, like quoting from various articles with attribution of the sources, my use of images that I don’t own the copyrights to is protected under the umbrella of “Fair Use.” From an article titled “What Is Fair Use?,” published by the Columbia University Libraries Copyright Advisory Office:
To determine whether you are within fair use, the law calls for a balanced application of these four factors:
- <div>the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;</div>
- <div>the nature of the copyrighted work;</div>
- <div>the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and</div>
- <div>the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.</div>
These four factors come directly from the fair use provision, Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, and they have been examined and developed in court rulings.
If there are instances where my use on this site fails to qualify under the above guidelines, then I will be happy to consider removing the offending images. More importantly, or if a copyright owner objects to my use of an unlicensed image — hasn’t happened yet in the 5 years of the site’s existence — I will remove the same ASAP.
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Correction:
If there are instances where my use on this site fails to qualify under the above guidelines, then I will be happy to remove the offending images. -
An important consideration in my use of images is the fact that I typically (more often than not) improve the quality of images as found (typically in Google searches) to create those that I incorporate into the site, through painstaking photo-editing: modifying the brightness, contrast, tint, borders (cropping), saturation, not infrequently retouching to remove blemishes, and occasionally combining multiple images.
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Okay so your answer is no.
Wanting to opt out of Pinterest pinning is not news to us. There are threads dating back 3 years on opting out of Pinterest. You can report any copyright violations to Pinterest. You use the DMCA complaints take down process to have your content removed just as you can in the case of any copyright violation. http://about.pinterest.com/copyright/
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I think Pinterest is abusing Fair Use practice on a massive scale.
Then hire a lawyer because WordPress.COM are not going to go to bat on any legal case for you.
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The average Google image searcher is not going to know the difference between the “songbook1.wordpress.com” or “songbook1.wordpress” seach I described above and the “site: songbook1.wordpress.com” you mention. The latter will give you a much higher percentage of direct links to Songbook, but who knows about it? I suspect that the “site: URL” search is not particularly well-known among average bloggers and image hunters.
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In fact, images searchers wouldn’t normally use the “Songbook1.WordPress” search either. That was just an illustration of how Pinterest is acquiring pageview credit for images published on my site up to six years ago. Such searches would usually come to images of mine more indirectly, through keyword or category searches, but the results are the same. Pinterest is credited with pageviews for images they copied from my site, apparently for the simple reason that Google ranks that site much much higher. How can a lone blogger expect to compete with that volume, that elevated rank?
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