Protect yourself from Pinterest.

Good question.

At the moment Pinterest are also having to work out how to tell when members pin images which are copyrighted.

Since they're speaking to Picscout about using their fingerprinting algorithm (the same one used by Youtube to detected copyrighted material), it's something that they'll be trying to address, but as you say, as a user of images you need to be very careful both where you get your images and how you publish/share them.

Images are getting a lot of attention now because of all the abuse that goes on from people using Google images that have been scraped from websites without the owner having rights to them or not providing rights for others to use them.

It's another area where I think a lot of newbies will get caught because, as usual, since it's something 'new' there are a lot of people cranking out "make money with Pinterest" products just because they know people will buy anything about it right now.

Seeing as how most countries GDP would triple if social sites were abolished, I would reckon the answer is no.

That's what I like about DigiMarc and I assume PicScout is the same. You are able to place a digital watermark that is unreadable to the eye and not easily removable by software.

They use that watermark to track your images.

So if someone were to use it in a way that doesn't represent your business you will be notified and can take appropriate action. Whether that be a request to give proper credit or a DMCA notice.

You'd be amazed how many times an image ends up in graphic packs people resell on their sites. With a little bit of tracking know how you can stop this theft. This is particularly important to artists and photographers who are actually selling those prints to earn their living.

Magazines also have a reason to protect their images from people who are scanning content with little regard for copyright. Part of the misuse is ignorance. Part blatant disregard. Either way you'd now have to power to do something about it.

Last weekend I saw a ton of unlicensed red carpet photos being shared. How sites like iStockPhoto regard this I'm not sure. They did stick a big visible watermark across the photo so everyone knew where they were coming from. Who knows if it actually helped or hurt their sales. Guess time will tell.

Yes and no. If people leave the links alone, yes. But it's fairly easy to change the destination link of a Pinterest re-pin. So you may lose some momentum to skeezy people who jump on the popularity of your image, change the link and redirect traffic to their crap offer.

I've even started seeing people creating blog posts of pins, changing the re-pin's link destination to their post, then from within that post linking to the originating blog. So they get the traffic. BUT, they're not getting permission to use your images on their blog. They just think it's a free for all.

Rashell