IT IS the social networking site-of-the-moment, gaining its first 10 million US users faster than either Facebook or Twitter. It seems that even Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has for an account. But is photo-sharing site about to the same copyright problems that music-sharing site Napster in 2001?
Pinterest allows users to create pinboards of photos, write captions and classify each pinboard by subject. Much like Twitter, users can 鈥渇ollow鈥� other people鈥檚 pinboards. Users can pin photos from anywhere on the web, upload them from smartphones 鈥� or 鈥渞epin鈥� other photos onto their own boards. The result? Photos are very widely republished.
The problem is that Pinterest, a 2-year-old company based in Palo Alto, California, runs no checks to stop people uploading images that infringe copyright. Photographers are certainly wary. 鈥淟ike all social networking sites, Pinterest presents a mixed bag for creators,鈥� says Eugene Mopsik, executive director of the . 鈥淲hile some may appreciate and encourage the sharing of their images for non-commercial use, others may find this troubling.鈥�
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Pinterest鈥檚 critics cite Google鈥檚 YouTube service as an example of how things should be done. YouTube ensures that users can鈥檛 upload video footage that infringes the copyright of almost 2000 TV, video, music and audio production companies. The technology, called Content ID, runs an algorithm over the original footage and generates a 鈥渇ingerprint鈥� reference file. These are checked against uploads, and the copyright owners alerted when a match occurs so they can choose to block the upload, or run ads alongside it. Google says it now has 6 million fingerprints covering 300,000 hours of footage.
聯Pinterest鈥檚 critics cite Google鈥檚 YouTube service as an example of how things should be done聰
Pinterest did not respond to New 杏吧原创鈥榮 questions about its copyright plans, but it has acknowledged that something must be done. Last week, it a piece of html code, called 鈥渘opins鈥�, which, when added to a website, prevents pictures being pinned.
It鈥檚 a start 鈥� and photo-sharing site Flickr is now using it 鈥� but it only works on web-hosted pictures, not uploads, and the code has to be inserted before trouble strikes. A better method may come from PicScout of Herzliya, Israel, a firm acquired last April by Getty Images, a picture library with 30 million online images to protect.
PicScout鈥檚 fingerprinting algorithm seeks out elements of an image that don鈥檛 change even when a picture has been cropped, rotated, flipped or had text overlaid on it, says PicScout CEO Offir Gutelzon. The algorithm crawls the web looking for the fingerprints of photos owned by 200 libraries.
Could such algorithms help Pinterest? 鈥淵es. We are in talks with Pinterest right now,鈥� says Gutelzon. 鈥淲e are not in the Napster era. We are in the era of solutions.鈥�
