Can WordPress staff help me to stop Pinterest users from pinning my images?

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  musicdoc1 · Member · Nov 12, 2014 at 10:38 pm

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  Then hire a lawyer because WordPress.COM are not going to go to bat on any legal case for you.

  Never asked them to. I just want a “no pin” meta tag inserted. My impression is that it’s currently only available, in the WordPress world, to WordPress.org users.

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  raincoaster · Member · Nov 12, 2014 at 11:22 pm

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  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.”

  Your belief, unless you are posting images at 120 px wide or less, is incorrect. As a journalist, I have to be very, very careful about which images I post and fair use isn’t the same as “oh it’s just a blogger, who cares?”

  You can prevent people from pinning your images if you use the Duotone theme, if I’m not mistaken. It also prevents right-click, save on all images except the left hand side of the most recent image. It’s not a great theme, though.

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  musicdoc1 · Member · Nov 13, 2014 at 12:12 am

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  raincoaster,

  Thanks for the advice. I will definitely consider your suggestions re: image size. Hadn’t known about the Duotone theme. Will look into it.

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  musicdoc1 · Member · Nov 13, 2014 at 12:23 am

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  raincoaster,
  I didn’t mean to suggest than I thought that any use of unlicensed copyrighted images is protected under Fair Use. I believe my use passes, but I could be wrong. Have not one received a single copyright complaint as yet on this site, though I did receive one, informally, on another site years ago. In that instance, I immediately complied with the photographer’s request for a single image to be removed.

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  musicdoc1 · Member · Nov 13, 2014 at 3:15 am

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  @timethief,

  Okay so your answer is no.

  According to the website ranking service Alexa, Pinterest is currently ranked 26th globally, 16th in the U.S. in popularity, although in their top 500 list, which might be updated less frequently, they are ranked 29th, three places behind WordPress. The site is approximately as popular as WordPress globally.

  Are you trying to tell me that Pinterest can build a site in which they randomly use unlicensed copyrighted images collected from countless sites by millions of users who take the images completely out of the context in which they were found and place them arbitrarily in collections of other randomly selected images on a massive, virtually unrestricted scale, and that’s all well and good, but if I use perhaps one millionth as many such images and incorporate each image in carefully constructed posts in which the images serve to illustrate historical events and personalities addressed in the posts, I am wrong?

  Google search results on “Pinterest value” by year:

  2011 ……. $2.5 billion as start-up
  2012 …….. estimates vary between $1 billion and $7.7 billion (Forbes)
  2013 …….. estimates vary between $2.0 billion and $3.8 billion
  2014 ……… $5 billion