Pinterest - Picture Yourself Sued

You’re Violating Copyright on Pinterest

Last modified on 2012-04-20 14:03:18 GMT. 6 comments. Top.

If you 'pin' photos to Pinterest you are probably violating copyright law. Have you looked at the Pinterest User Agreement? They put the liability for copyright violations on YOU.

by Heather Bussing

I have been told several times lately, by really smart people, that it’s okay to pin photographs on Pinterest as long as you link to the source or the artist.

This is true only if they also gave you permission to use their photograph. Otherwise you are stealing their stuff and admitting that it’s theirs.

Photographs have copyright protection. The photographer owns the copyright and has the exclusive right to reproduce, display, and distribute those images. For commercial photographs, the company that pays for the photo shoot usually also has rights to protect the image.

So unless you have paid for the rights, purchased a license, or received permission to use the image, you are violating copyright law when you pin a photo on your page.

Yeah, right. Who’s going to catch me?  

It’s not hard. I can take one of my photographs and upload it to a google image search. Google will quickly and conveniently show me everywhere on the web that my photo has been picked up and used.

Right, but who’s really going to sue me?

If I wanted to sue, I would hire Carolyn E. Wright who specializes in copyright violations for photographers. She agrees that Pinterest has copyright issues, and so do you. (If you watch the video, the issue of user liability starts at minute 32.)

Wright also says that some photographers like the exposure, others don’t. But because it’s hard to prove a lot of damage from a single pin of an image, you probably won’t see a lot of photographers bringing lawsuits.

However, there are people who do have a lot of money at stake in how photographs are used.  Many of the images online are from stock photography shops who either own the copyright to the images, or the rights to sell copies for a certain period of time. These businesses depend on being able to control when and how the images are reproduced.  One of the biggest stock photography companies, Corbis, is owned by Bill Gates. Corbis controls over 100 million images and as well as the rights to digital reproduction of major museums like the National Gallery in London.

I promise, when these images start showing up all over Pinterest, lawsuits will get filed.

And have you looked at the Pinterest User Agreement?  They put the liability for copyright violations on You.

So while I know many Pinterest fans, and that it’s the latest, coolest, new internet toy, I’m not on it. The copyright issues are why.

Further reading:

One of the best explanations of the issue and problem I’ve seen is Dan Heller’s Pinterest Copyright Infringement: Yeah, so what?, March 15, 2012 at www.danheller.com

Kathleen Davis’ Pinterest’s Photo Copyright Infringement Issues Get More Complex, March 20,2012 at www.popphoto.com

Tim Bukher’s Pinterest and Copyright Infringement at www.lawtechie.com

Gonzalo E. Mon’s The Copyright Question: How to Protect Yourself on Pinterest, March 21 2012 at www.mashable.com

To learn more about photography and copyright, read Carolyn Wright’s excellent blog posts at www.photoattorney.com

And my post: Ideas Are Free But Content Isn’t- Copyright and the Internet, March 15, 2011.

Time Is All We Have

Last modified on 2012-04-20 13:58:44 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

A businessperson with a watch knows what time it is, but a businessperson with two watches does not. Most managers tell time with Industrial Age watches, acting as if Internet time does not exist and missing the prospects it offers.

Networks arise when isolated entities link to one another. Improvements in communications technology (e.g., the invention of language, writing, printing, mass communication, computer networks) encourage connections. The denser its linkages, the shorter a network’s cycle time. Speed begets speed.

The connections that knit us together make us interdependent. Because other members of the network impact what you do, you lose even the illusion of control. The future becomes unpredictable.

Factory workers once were paid for what they produced. In a mechanized system, the slowest worker produced only slightly less than the fastest. If workers produced one widget an hour, paying by the hour was equivalent to paying by the widget. It also was simpler to measure. Managers became accustomed to equating time with production.

For the knowledge worker, time on the job often is unrelated to output. Google’s recruiters figure that an exemplary engineer can create 200 times more value than an average engineer. Only a fool would think it fair to pay each by the hour.

Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.

Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.

That single moment of brilliance may be more valuable than years of production. The flash occurs in Internet time. A year of Internet time is roughly equivalent to seven years of calendar time. The term came into being because in its first year, Netscape was said to accomplish what had taken others at least seven years. (The firm has since imploded at an accelerated pace as well.) Internet time is a generalization, like a New York minute, the idea being that it’s faster than regular time.

A businessperson with a watch knows what time it is, but a businessperson with two watches does not. Most managers tell time with Industrial Age watches, acting as if Internet time does not exist and missing the prospects it offers.

Opportunities abound because the world now moves on ideas instead of things. Value has migrated from tangible assets you could see and touch to intangible assets such as ideas, relationships, patterns and reputation. Twenty-five years ago, intangible assets accounted for less than a third of the valuation of U.S. companies. Ten years later, more than 80 percent of that value was intangible.
In the world of intangibles, quality trumps quantity. You can build a relationship or develop an idea in a fraction of the time it took to build a factory. Furthermore, some efforts yield outsized rewards. As in nature, for every action, there may be an unequal and totally unexpected reaction. The butterfly that flaps its wings in the Amazon is perhaps the catalyst for Hurricane Katrina. An algorithm might give birth to the 17th most valuable company on the Fortune 500.

Chief learning officers consider themselves enlightened if they provide workers with a month of training per year. This would have been generous when the pace of business allowed for three-martini lunches and the nature of work rarely changed. Today, everyone is busy nearly every waking moment, they figure things out on their own, and they deal with increasingly complex situations. Routine tasks crowd out reflection and innovation.

Today’s managers have scenarios and possibilities, not single-track plans. This calls for new models. Some creative workers would produce more value were they required to dedicate 11 months of the year to learning and one month to innovation and decision making. Meta-learning and flexible infrastructure are becoming more important than individual topics. “Learning to be” will supplant “learning to know.”

At the dawn of the network age, managers enjoyed the luxury of annual planning. They communicated the firm’s goals to the training department, which in turn translated those goals into workshops, learning management systems and so forth. Back then, the past resembled the future closely enough that driving by the rearview mirror was feasible. Today’s rapid changes require very responsive driving skills. The road is being built a little of the way ahead, and it could take a turn we don’t expect.

Evenbase Sets New Pace

Last modified on 2012-04-20 14:12:16 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

When the VP of HR slot is filled from within the ranks of the department, people with Recruiting backgrounds have the advantage.

Acquisition of Jobrapido Makes Evenbase the Fifth Largest Global Job Board Brand

If the name Evenbase doesn’t quite ring any bells yet , listen closely. You’ll hear them in the distance. They’re getting louder.

The company, which includes all of DMGT‘s job board properties (and job posting powerhouse Broadbean), is focused on aggressive adaptation to the changing landscape of sourcing. Evenbase was launched as an overarching brand earlier this year. The core properties include a dozen well known job boards. The company “powers” a significant percentage of the industry.

The company is at the beginning of a long march of planned innovation and market disruption. Today’s big news is that Evenbase has acquired Jobrapido, the Italian job aggregator and pay per click advertising stalwart. The paperwork is drying on the deal which was signed on Friday.

With Jobrapido in its portfolio, Evenbase joins the top five global sourcing brands, measured in traffic terms. The top five are:

• Indeed
• Monster
• CareerBuilder
• LinkedIn
• Evenbase

Domestic American readers may not be familiar with Jobrapido. Built by the same kind of scrappy entrepreneurs who created other job aggregation sites, the Jobrapido team is global in its focus. They have a tiny footprint in the US so far. Last month, Jobrapido had 32 Million unique visitors

Here in the states, it’s easy to overlook the complexities and challenges of Global sourcing. Our conferences and trade publications have the traditional inward perspective of America in economic hard times. When you remember that the us is about 5% of global population, it’s easy to see that there’s a massive market that does fairly well.

What’s more interesting is the success that European entrepreneurs are having in the US. Broadbean, led by Kelly Robinson, its founder, is tearing up the American job post distribution market. The company began small and found its way in the British market.

Kelly is building out the US market for Broadbean in a very hands on way. Evenbase manages its acquisitions by rewarding them for doing what they are already good at doing. This was critical for the deal with Jobrapido.

The press releases are full of the sort of predictable banter about synergies and destiny. In some ways, that really misses the point. The Recruiting market is extremely global and extremely local at the same time.

Keith Potts, the founder of Jobsite and CEO of Evenbase is looking to bring the global recruiting marketplace into clear focus. As the spearhead of this acquisition, he’s gunning for the next horizon. He says that their business is the sourcing of candidates, wherever that takes us.

It’s Not Really a Network

Last modified on 2012-04-20 13:48:31 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The most important thing that people are about to remember is that face to face encounters trump everything.

We are at the edges of the second generation of social media. Much of the original hype has been tested and found wanting. It turns out that we don’t really like seeing job ads in the middle of the flow of descriptions of last night’s burritos. It seems like we don’t really want to flood our personal brag-a-thons with the story of our struggle to find meaning and work. We are not really the company’s solution to its staffing problems nor are we our friends’ gateway to work.

We like each other better when there’s less pressure to be commercial.

So, what does phase 2 look like?

• The most important thing that people are about to remember is that face to face encounters trump everything. Personal video, which has played a tiny role in contemporary social networks, will emerge as a central feature. That will be facilitated by tools that can read video to create and index transcripts. (Saygent Technology is doing interesting things with the audio portion of this question.)
• Expect at least some of the hype to soften. Social Media and its related tools are not a panacea. They are a new always-on messaging infrastructure that allows us to understand and quantify what used to be hard to quantify. That we will communicate status periodically is a given. How that evolves is much less clear. Customers are going to tire of claims that are not delivered. Vendors who act like partners will be rewarded. Customers who understand that partnership involves risk sharing will be rewarded.
• Successful users, individuals and organizations, will have an experimental attitude and the resources with which to experiment. Like Thomas Edison, who tried 3,000 theories before solving the lightbulb filament problem, competitive advantage will accrue to those who are willing to stick it out.
• Transparency is contagious and unstoppable. The next generation will involve increasing numbers of sensors that help us understand a kajillion things that were never measured before. The importance of mobile may not be for content reception. Rather, it will be the greatest source of input for spot reviews and very brief data inputs.
• Physical get togethers will be more tightly integrated into the overall social media structure. If you haven’t taken a close look at the MeetUp movement, amazing things are happening. Networking involves people talking and listening to each other. So far, the vast majority of online networking involves broadcasting.
• The massive quantities of data we are generating will look like trickles before the deluge. Deciding what and how much of your datastream to expose will be the next frontier in personal branding.
• The world will look back at today’s notions of gamification and say, “Really, a badge for reading the news on Google? and a badge for turning in your expense report? That was supposed to do what?” Meanwhile, the hordes of people who have disciplined their personal creativity by playing advanced online games in community will have received the necessary training (from playing) to build the sorts of interactive communities that make talent pools a great place to hang out.

It’s not that social media is over. Rather, it’s just another way to communicate, one of many.

The “everything is a network” phase will be followed by something simultaneously more realistic and impossible to imagine.