Pintrerest, one of the fastest growing sites in the social media world has created an interesting problem for users.
While scouring the web, you found high quality images on the latest trends in gothic interior decoration that captured your aesthetic. You save them onto your computer and upload them on your Pinterest profile. It immediately enhances your profile and attracts a legion of followers. Pinterest finds them unique enough to sell the images to third parties. In four weeks you are served with a demand letter by counsel for an interior decoration company that owns the photos for damages, threatening a lawsuit if you don’t pay up. What happened?
In a nutshell, you violated Pinterest’s User Agreement, and Pinterest isn’t responsible. The Boston Business Journal quickly determined it was better to be safe than sorry and within a day of posting images it used in its coverage of real estate development it deleted them. A quick analysis of Pinterest’s terms quickly leads to one conclusion: you must own or otherwise have the authority to grant Pinterest’s parent company “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” the image.
In simpler terms, you must either be the original owner or else have permission from the owner to allow Pinterest to utilize the image in any of the ways the user agreement sets out.
By using Pinterest, you are agreeing to something that many people and companies don’t fully realize: copyright ownership or licensing. In the social networking era, it’s become far too easy to copy images strewn across the web and make them our own. The problem is that it may open you up to liability. With the courts imposing fines of up to $150,000 for each song uploaded that is otherwise owned by a record label or recording artist, it’s not entirely impossible for owners of images to request damages that match the commercial value and potential of the images used. The law is still evolving in this realm, but with service providers and platforms such as Pinterest shielded from liability arising from its users’ conduct, it’s become all too important to be careful. If not, you may be paying a steep price for your Pinterest profile.
- Sheheryar Sardar, BroadStreet Times
Sheheryar Sardar, Esq., is a Partner at Sardar Law Firm LLC with substantial experience in entrepreneurship. For more information on contract law or digital media law, contact: Sardar Law Firm at sardar@sardarlawfirm.com.
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Article source: http://socialmedialegal.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/uploading-images-on-pinterest-can-get-you-sued/
During a Kansas Youth in Government field trip to the state Capitol on November 21, Emma Sullivan, a teenager, Tweeted: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” She did actually say anything to Kansas Governor Brownback, and stated that the Tweet was in regards to a personal joke with friends.
The next day, Sullivan was called into the high school principal’s office regarding the incident. After noting that he needed to do “damage control,” the principal asked Sullivan to write a letter of apology to Governor Brownback and his staff. He set Monday as the due date for the letter.
With the support of many peers and her parents, Sullivan decided that she would not write an apology letter – and the school district agreed with her.
Sullivan’s predicament is one that is gaining serious publicity, with articles such as “Think Before You Tweet” circulating the corporate boardrooms, and now school systems, “Tweeting has largely replaced “talking” in many forms…But in this jump into social media, no one has stopped to think: this is social media, but it’s still media. How can this effect me, my business, or my job?“
Though Sullivan walked out of this situation with public and administrative support, it does the beg the question: when does (or can) Tweeting go too far?
- Scott Ellison, The BroadStreet Times
On November 16, 2011 Congress began review of The Protect IP Act (PIPA) is a U.S. Senate bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy and its House counterpart Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Since their introduction in May 2011, the bills have been met with severe backlash, with opposers calling them “innovation killers” and “patently unjust.” On the first day of hearings even Rep. Lamar Smith, a chief sponsor of the bill, expressed uncertainty over the bill’s scope.
The legislation has been opposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Yahoo!, eBay, American Express, Google, Reporters Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch to name a few. Media-sharing services such as Vimeo and Flickr, along with crowd favorite e-commerce communities such as Etsy could be the types of sites at risk under the Stop Online Piracy Act. Fight for the Future published a 3-minute infographic video explaining the basics of the bills and their impact on everyday activities of online interactions.
The bills are designed to provide the government and copyright holders the power to block access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods,” especially those registered outside the United States. If passed, PIPA and SOPA would allow the government to prevent public access to websites with “no significant use” other than copyright infringement, or enabling such infringement. It would also make unauthorized media streaming a felony and hold web publishers and hosting services responsible for curbing users from acts involving copyright-infringement.
All in all – it would make most everyday media usage a crime, hold people accountable even if they did not know it was going on, and it would focus energies away from real issues (such as lack of healthcare and a dying economy). SOPA would also get rid of the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content upon notice.
Under the bill, the Justice Department would be allowed to obtain court orders demanding that American ISPs prevent users from visiting blacklisted websites. ISPs receiving such orders would have to alter records in the net’s system for looking up website names, known as DNS. The House bill would also enable the Justice Department to order sites like Google to remove allegedly “rogue” sites from search results. As with many other bills, the determination of what is “rogue” would be out of the hands of the general public, the companies hosting the content, and anyone with direct understanding of the content and its use. It would give unprecedented censorship power to the US government.
The potential censorship issues were met with strong arguments that some measure of law is needed to police the piracy and counterfeiting problems rampant on the Internet.
“Doing nothing is not an option,” Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina noted. “Not only are online piracy and counterfeiting drains on our economy, they expose consumers to fraud, identity theft, confusion and to harm.”
His sentiments were echoed by John Clark, the security chief for Pfizer, who testified about counterfeit drug sales on the internet. “I see counterfeited medicines as attempted murder,” said Clark.
Proponents of the bill also argue that if nothing is done, the US Copyright system will be rendered useless. However, it is unclear how the copyright system would fail when companies like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark and Amazon are the mostly commonly used sources for legitimate music downloads.
The issues comes down to this: how many rights are we willing to give up here? Is it worth it? And does Congress understand the numerous options available on the Internet? After all, computer savvy users will always find a workaround; but the people who would be held accountable would be minor offenders, and under this bill, even accidental offenders.
With strong arguments on both sides of the bills, the answer remains unclear.
- Sheheryar T. Sardar, Esq., Originally published in The BroadStreet Times
On November 16, 2011 Congress began review of The Protect IP Act (PIPA) is a U.S. Senate bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy and its House counterpart Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Since their introduction in May 2011, the bills have been met with severe backlash, with opposers calling them “innovation killers” and “patently unjust.” On the first day of hearings even Rep. Lamar Smith, a chief sponsor of the bill, expressed uncertainty over the bill’s scope.
The legislation has been opposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Yahoo!, eBay, American Express, Google, Reporters Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch to name a few. Media-sharing services such as Vimeo and Flickr, along with crowd favorite e-commerce communities such as Etsy could be the types of sites at risk under the Stop Online Piracy Act. Fight for the Future published a 3-minute infographic video explaining the basics of the bills and their impact on everyday activities of online interactions.
The bills are designed to provide the government and copyright holders the power to block access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods,” especially those registered outside the United States. If passed, PIPA and SOPA would allow the government to prevent public access to websites with “no significant use” other than copyright infringement, or enabling such infringement. It would also make unauthorized media streaming a felony and hold web publishers and hosting services responsible for curbing users from acts involving copyright-infringement.
All in all – it would make most everyday media usage a crime, hold people accountable even if they did not know it was going on, and it would focus energies away from real issues (such as lack of healthcare and a dying economy). SOPA would also get rid of the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content upon notice.
Under the bill, the Justice Department would be allowed to obtain court orders demanding that American ISPs prevent users from visiting blacklisted websites. ISPs receiving such orders would have to alter records in the net’s system for looking up website names, known as DNS. The House bill would also enable the Justice Department to order sites like Google to remove allegedly “rogue” sites from search results. As with many other bills, the determination of what is “rogue” would be out of the hands of the general public, the companies hosting the content, and anyone with direct understanding of the content and its use. It would give unprecedented censorship power to the US government.
The potential censorship issues were met with strong arguments that some measure of law is needed to police the piracy and counterfeiting problems rampant on the Internet.
“Doing nothing is not an option,” Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina noted. “Not only are online piracy and counterfeiting drains on our economy, they expose consumers to fraud, identity theft, confusion and to harm.”
His sentiments were echoed by John Clark, the security chief for Pfizer, who testified about counterfeit drug sales on the internet. “I see counterfeited medicines as attempted murder,” said Clark.
Proponents of the bill also argue that if nothing is done, the US Copyright system will be rendered useless. However, it is unclear how the copyright system would fail when companies like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark and Amazon are the mostly commonly used sources for legitimate music downloads.
The issues comes down to this: how many rights are we willing to give up here? Is it worth it? And does Congress understand the numerous options available on the Internet? After all, computer savvy users will always find a workaround; but the people who would be held accountable would be minor offenders, and under this bill, even accidental offenders.
With strong arguments on both sides of the bills, the answer remains unclear.
- Sheheryar T. Sardar, Esq., Sardar Law Firm LLC*
For more information on contract law or digital media law, contact: Sardar Law Firm at sardar@sardarlawfirm.com.
First published in The BroadStreet Times
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Article source: http://socialmedialegal.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/stop-piracy-or-innovation/
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