I completely agree with you on the wording in the Terms of Service – this is exactly what scared my client off as well. It’s ironic that Pinterest is designed for beautiful, high res images, but that it puts the creators of those images at the most risk in terms of their intellectual property.

I have a feeling that this issue is going to come to a head quite soon. Some of the blogs I’ve been reading have been comparing Pinterest to Napster. Not sure if its that bad, but someone is going to file a lawsuit – its just bound to happen – and hopefully that will force more clarity to the issue!

Thanks for commenting!

Kathleen

I wanted to add–there’s another aspect to the “downsides” that most people aren’t talking about that is actually the bigger issue that copyright infringement, in my view, for anyone with IP.

The TOS says: “…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.”

Using is bad enough. But “transferable,” “sublicense,” “adapt,” “modify,” “license,” “sell,” and “transfer” take that to a whole new level.

WOULD Pinterest do any of that? Most people doubt it. But that’s not the point. The point is that they CAN if they want to.

By way of example…later today, say they open a store on the site and start to sell your stuff. I think that would really bother bunches of people, but hey–they have the right to do that. Have your URL on an image? No problem, they have the right to modify it and remove that, and then sell your image. They can also give other people the right to do that.

From a business perspective, it’s lunacy to agree to that.

Tumblr is the same, as is Typepad. Facebook and Twitter aren’t as bad.

The bottom line is that some overly zealous attorney wrote something designed to absolutely protect Pinterest from any sort of lawsuit (although the way it’s written may not hold up in court). Frankly, I just prefer to not give them my stuff to “maybe” do something with.

Anastacia