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
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