Copyright within Pinterest

Mostly everyone you talk to today, knows what the website Pinterest is. Pinterest is a website that is solely based on users 'pinning' links they like and what images they enjoy viewing. This service is great for women everywhere because we love other people giving us ideas for our children's birthday parties, the way we workout, or even how we should dress. This system is also great for all of those DIY'ers that love to create everything possible by themselves.

This service may seem great, but this idea has come into a lot of copyright and legal issues within this servers content. While users can post ideas that are their own, some don't give credit where credit is due. The way a pin works, is that an image is previewing per say, the website that it is coordinated with, and on the bottom of the pin is a quick little description of what this entire pin is about. However, you may have a pin that links to your website but the image that is being previewed is not your own image. A user can easily steal a photographer or a designer's image and not copyright it which doesn't give the creator the credit that they want. Many photographers and such are too nice to sue on such a small-scale copyright infringement, however if your 'pin' goes viral and starts to circulate all around the world, and the preview image that was showcased on your pin, may soon be linked to your website and the creator of that image may be very unhappy with you and press charges.

There have been many lawsuits involving Pinterest, and yet the majority of the users have no idea that this is a form of copyright infringement, or where these images that they are posting are coming from. Lawsuits against Pinterest have claimed that Pinterest is just like Google Image Search, in that there are thousands of images on display for everyone to see. However, that claim is not true at all. When an image is uploaded to Pinterest, the image is stored within Pinterest's 'walls' and then becomes part of Pinterest forever. Unlike Pinterest, Google Image Search doesn't store the images within its system, which helped their case during a court hearing.

Pinterest seems to keep their copyright rules where they are now, and not change policy. I feel like in the future we will soon see Pinterest in a lot more legal issues pertaining to copyright infringement.

Article on Pinterest Copyright violations

Search Engine Empire, The Google Story

Throughout the years, the Internet has evolved in ways that us humans could have never expected. It may seem that the Internet has taken up a mind of its own, by determining what we want to see and what it thinks we want to know.

The fact of the matter is that there is no "common Google" anymore and that everyones Google searches and webpages are customized and not standard. According to Eli Pariser, who went onto TEDTalks and explained that Google has created a 'filter bubble' where it only allows what it wants you to see and what you may want to find. (TEDTalks Video HERE). Google has become such a worldwide search engine that it has started to be used as a verb. As stated in my blog, Google (verb), I talk about how people are using terms such as "Oh just google it", and actually the term to 'google' is being used when even talking about using other search engines. The way that the world is flocking around Google is starting to hit very dangerous levels, because if in fact Google does continue to try and secretly regulate what we see, we will soon depend on Google with such immensity that we won't know what to do with out this huge search engine. When children have a report to do on the term "mountains" per say, they won't go to the local library anymore and check out books. The first thing children do, is connect to the internet and search the term on Google.

When looking up terms and wanted phrases on Google, each screen will be different, as stated in the TEDTalks seminar, which obviously prevents you from seeing many different sites that may be beneficial to you. If you mostly google images, then your search results will most likely have Google Images results before any website. (Notice how I used the term google as a verb.) Being such a search engine giant like Google is, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that everything is based around Google. 

SNS Hall of Fame: Twitter

In 140 characters or less, it is pretty hard to try and get clear, important, and impacting news across for the whole world to see. The social networking site, Twitter has revolutionized the way breaking news has traveled around the world and has earned its way into the SNS Hall of Fame. Throughout the years that Twitter has been online, many world wide breaking news stories have occurred and have been broadcasted on this wonderful site. From the riots breaking out around the world, to owners of basketball teams making racist statements, Twitter has created san easy and (short) way to communicate and broadcast your opinion rapidly. Twitter reaches out to such a large crowd in such a quick time due to their use of "hashtags". The hashtag basically is a statement or phrase that is used to describe an event, which is then broadcasted, then you have the ability to type in that hashtag and see every tweet around the world that relates to the event happening. It is an easy and fast way to spread the word quickly and efficiently.

Below is a map that shows the activity on Twitter after Donald Sterling (owner of the Clippers) was fired, using the hashtag #Bannedforlife.

Twitter Map