I love Pinterest – let me just get that out there first. It’s a fun platform to use and discover new and amazing things. I heard it likened to fantasy football for girls and I don’t think the analogy is too far off. It can be a good way for people to discover your products and services and website.

As people start pinning everything, it’s important to keep in mind that for the creators, Pinterest is a business. This may not immediately occur to you as you’re pinning away and creating new boards, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

To understand what this means for you – let’s look at how they make money. It’s built into their terms and conditions that anything you pin on Pinterest, they own, and can do whatever they wish with. (Quote via Pinterest Terms and Conditions)

“you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.” 

For example, this means that they could take that photo you pinned, of the necklace you made, the cake you baked and your kid’s birthday party decorations and sell them, owning the rights to those images to resell and publish forever. So, you can make that decision to give away the rights of your photos, but if you don’t own the original photo you pin, beware – you could be liable for copyright infringement.  The Boston Business Journal stopped using Pinterest for this very reason.

“Exceptions for publishers of user-generated content protect Pinterest, but they don’t protect you,” Moore wrote with a link back to an earlier ReadWriteWeb article. “Unless you know you have a ‘worldwide, irrevocable,’ perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license,’ you’d better tread carefully.”  (via ReadWriteWeb)

Or, if you post a photo of the new book you just wrote, they can amend the link to not go to your book page to purchase it, but instead add on their own affiliate link to Amazon, earning affiliate commissions from the sale of that book and anything else that was purchased in the Amazon shopping cart. A recent CNN report showed they were doing this very thing.

“CNN reports that the popular virtual pinboard social network site has been ‘appending affiliate links to some pins,’ particularly those featuring goods from Amazon, eBay, Target and thousands more merchants.” (via ReadWriteWeb)

So what can you or should you do about it?

1. Read all Terms and Conditions very carefully. If you are not in full agreement – do not sign up for that service.

2. If you are pinning a new photo or image to Pinterest, be sure you have ownership rights of the image you are posting, and are willing to give those rights to Pinterest

3. If you own the photos – it may be worth giving up the rights if you are receiving new traffic and business from Pinterest. Just be informed about why and what you’re doing, and that the short term gain is worth more than the long-term ownership of the images would be for you.

4. If you don’t want others to Pin your images (thus infringing upon your rights and leaving you to wrangle with them and Pinterest to try and somehow get your images back) you can insert code into your website to block images from being pinned on Pinterest. (Here is a tutorial on how to do this via Typecast ) {important note: this will only stop people from using the “Pin It” button from their toolbar to post your image – they can circumvent this by using the image url and pinning it directly through Pinterest}

Want to learn more – here is a great article about this: Is Pinterest a Haven for Copyright Violations?