They're putting it on the Web. Traditionally, there is assumed to be a certain degree of permission involved in putting content on the Web unless you specifically indicate otherwise. If we don't assume this permission, Web browsers would be just as bad, since they download and cache your copyrighted content.

(Note to downvoters: If you believe I'm wrong, a response would do a better job of correcting the misinformation. If you believe I'm posting this is bad faith, you're mistaken. I really don't see how the Web can coexist with the assumption "A program may not download resources offered by a webserver without explicit opt-in permission.")

I completely agree with you. Opt-in means nothing would ever be done in this world, because everyone would be wasting resources on getting permissions. No browsers, no search engines, no Wikipedia, no HN, no nothing.

The rule of thumb should be: you opt-in when you put your stuff on the Internet.

You're joking, right? The overwhelming majority of sites either don't care or are positive towards stuff like Pinterest (more ad eyeballs, for example). It's the rarity to [i]not[/i] want to be shareable.

No, I'm not "joking". The default license for content without an explicit license is that it is copyrighted. There are existing tags for looser licensing (e.g. creative commons). This is an obnoxious demand, and the "we decide whether it benefits you, and thus determine how we violate your rights" is a garbage way to proceed. No kidding it serves pinterest, though.

Do you think Google Image Search is bad, too? If not, what's the relevant difference?

It's like saying being indexed by Google should be opt-in.

A relatively tiny site is demanding a site-specific meta tag for them to not commercial benefit by violating your copyright. Google, in contrast, observes long existing, cross-industry tags and behaviors.

And Google is hardly the example counterpoint: Many of its activities do border on very questionable. In Google's ideal world you never leave Google.com as they're filtered everyone else's content down to everything you need.

ever heard of "fair use"?

Yup, I have. And saying "fair use" makes about as much sense as saying "abracadabra" -- it's an incredibly narrow set of criteria that you can use if you're actually in court, not a magic word you can utter to make things work to your advantage.

Meanwhile, the assumed default status of anything created in a Berne Convention country in the past 90 years or so is still "all rights reserved".

So you're saying Pinterest only copy US created content to their servers?

Why? Because this is the internet. I shouldn't have to ask permission every time I want to create a hyperlink.

It has nothing to do with creating a hyperlink. It has to do with misappropriating copyrighted content for commercial purposes.

Rephrase, Everyone on the internet shouldn't have to ask permission when they want to create a hyperlink on a public site.

It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.

>It's not a hyperlink, pininterest is either hot-linking or making a copy of images to which it has no copyright for and for which the users who added these images do not have copyright access to.

More likely than not, hotlinking. Also, lawyers ruin everything.

Pinterest is downloading images from other sites and hosting it on their own servers. No one is complaining about linking or even hotlinking.

Couldn't that be considered caching? Wouldn't people be upset if they were hotlinking?

pinboard, del.icio.us, ... (if other bookmarking sites still exist, please add here) is downloading title-text from other sites and hosting it on their own servers. what's the difference?

It seems reasonable to me that taking meta-data would fall under fair-use but taking the actual media wouldn't.

For example: Scraping <title> tags off Netflix would be legit, but copying Netflix video files wouldn't.

The difference being that pictures are commonly inserted inline in the web for discussion/humour/other purposes more than video. When a video is inserted in a page, more often than not it's the focus of the page.

I always thought of rehosting images as the courteous thing to do. Say someone made an image macro that you want to insert inline into a post on a board somewhere. Depending on the popularity of the forum, hotlinking it could suck up their bandwidth allotment and get their site knocked offline. The nice thing to do would be then to rehost it (using Imgur or the like) and link it that way.

Well, Facebook not only takes parts of text, but also displays thumbnails of actual image content of the linked site.

Thumbnails and excerpts are pretty clearly fair use. Especially when you are trying to encourage the market for the copyrighted work.