Pinterest is awesome. I can't tell you how much better it is to have those little virtual bulletin boards than it is to have hundreds of bookmarked pages lamely labeled "recipes" or "craft ideas." Instead, when I need a recipe, I can go to my boards and see what my choices are. And once I've selected one, I can click on it, and voila, I arrive at the original page.Except when I don't. Grrr. I hate it when people pin a whole blog when they mean to pin a post, or worse, they pin the picture location instead of the website. So, it doesn't always work out the way it's supposed to. And then you get people repinning these poorly created pins, and it's just impossible to find what you are looking for.
It gets worse. Someone I follow, a friend from the stitching bloggers community, had recently pinned a Bent Creek "freebie." I recognized it not as a freebie at all but rather as a paid chart. Yikes! That's not good. So I told her, and then commented to the person she had repinned. Then I went to see where that person had repinned from and found...it will shock you...tens of regular--for pay--charts that had been scanned in and shared as "freebies." Ack! I contacted one of the designers who is in the process of filling out copyright forms to reclaim her rights from the pinners.
Now I know that there are some people who are never going to get on board with the idea of copyright; I'm not going to worry about them. Well, I do worry for your soul, but this isn't about you. There are many of us who do comply. I bet a lot of us blithely pin things labeled a "freebie" without thinking twice about it. I do believe we're going to have to start.
1. If it doesn't have "free chart" ("grille gratis") written right on the graph, it may not be a free chart.
2. If the pin doesn't take you back to the designer's website or flickr or facebook page, it's probably not free.
3. If, when you click through, you end up on a Russian or Chinese website, copyright is being violated.
4. If you can see the edge of the scan, definitely violation.
Please check your pins. Please tell violators that they are violating. Let's do what we can to help our designing friends.
9 comments:
Amen
Hear hear. I've been trying to make sure my pins are legit, espsecially about leading back to the original source. Anything that I pin myself from a blog or whatever, I make sure leads back to the original post, not the entire blog or website. And if I repin someone else, I try to make sure it's an original source. If it's not, *I* pin the original source and leave a comment on the pin I wold have repinned. I don't know if there are a lot of people that know you can edit a pin and change the link without changing the picture though. Also, I think there are a lot of lazy people out there that will never look at these pins again.
Right on Anna!
I try so hard to be careful about what I pin. If a pin goes to a link aggregator site, I will search out the original site (Google image search is great for this).
As for cross stitch charts, that is so hard. I only re-pin what I know 100% to be free.
I made the mistake of pinning a few of those in the beginning not believe my good luck in finding them. Now I'm really careful about what I pin. I've had a few removed too, so I'm thinking that they weren't suppose to be pinned in the first place.
Thank you for this, I do think a lot of people pin them in good faith, but it is so important to check
I love Pintrest for the same reason. And as someone who makes at least a part of her living from writing, THANK YOU. It's important that people get paid for their creative efforts.
A while back, I was trying to find an out of print chart after seeing another stitcher's finish posted on her blog. In my search I came across scans of the entire leaflet on a Chinese site. I emailed the designer to alert her, and her response was something to the effect that she was aware of the site and had repeatedly tried to have her designs removed but they just kept getting reposted. It's very unfortunate. By the way,I did locate and purchase the chart after several weeks of searching and being outbid on a couple of auctions.
I haven't done Pinterest yet, I can barely keep up with blogging!!
I do get cross with people on Facebook who link direct to charts not the website and always ask "could you post the website as I'd really like to see other designs by this person". Kind of makes the point in a non-confrontational way.
I also inform designers if I find links to their work being pirated.
Keep up the good work!
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