Problems with Pinterest and copyright. You could be sued for pinning

I think there is a difference between sharing an image you don't own but that is publicly available - than pirating. Sure if you purchase a bunch of stock photos then circulate them via pinterest - that's outright illegal. Another nasty area would be pins that (regardless of the image used) point you to somewhere dodgy, - like an image of The Simpsons logo, pointing to a MediaFire like download site of the latest episode.

It's certainly a thorny issue though for sure - and Pinterest (I feel) is just bringing it to the fore. The root problem already exists in all social media - sharing of content across Facebook and Twitter is already rife - but because Pinterest focuses on it visually, it's getting a lot of attention.

As others mentioned, they have released code to allow sites to prevent pinning - and they have introduced in the last couple of months the description to be mandatory, not optional.

Personally, I feel the web is a little like a giant advertisement, so sharing someone's content (as long as credit is given - i.e. you share from the original source) is not only fair - but in fact flattering and helping them. If someone posts content on the web freely that they don't want shared, then they should have thought more carefully, they can always add a watermark.

Of course, I would not condone the stuff mentioned above - or promoting content as if their own in order to profit from it.