Some Pinterest Cat Stuff with Comment
Here are some really nice cat images from Pinterest. They are just a small selection. They are embedded from the Pinterest website, which means the images are held on a Pinterest computer (server) and loaded into other people’s websites using an embed code (a piece of html code).
Personally I strongly dislike Pinterest because I say it is almost based on a disregard of intellectual property rights. What Pinterest wants is for copyright to be watered down or thrown out. The company feeds on people’s lack of knowledge and awareness of copyright and the impossible task of enforcing intellectual property rights on the internet. The guys who started Pinterest probably sat down in Starbucks and decided that they would use these truths to their advantage.
It also seems to me that the founders of Pinterest decided that 99.9% of the photos on the internet are commercially worthless and shouldn’t therefore be copyright protected. What they appear to have ignored is that images that are individually commercially worthless can add commercial value to a website through advertising on the site.
I find it very cynical and an example of business abusing people’s rights in a very similar way that banks con people because people don’t understand what is going on.
Like Facebook, and the banks, the motto of these big businesses is: “Confuse and Abuse”.
Complex charging tariffs are based on the same policy. If people don’t know what the charges are they can be charged more.
I don’t like embedding images from another website because if the image is deleted on the host site it will disappear on this site. I would expect to see a notice saying, “Image no longer available” or some such thing in about 6 months time!
Note: I am using these images from a site I don’t agree with because as I can’t beat Pinterest I might as well use it in a way that might benefit PoC. However in putting these images here, I am exposed to a potential injunction from the author of these images to remove them.
Update 18th May 2013: All the Pinterest pictures have disappeared! Surprised? No, not me because the originals on Pinterest should not have been there and then someone complains. The images are removed and then the image embedding code stops working so they disappear.
I’ll add something different some nice cat images from Flickr instead in a slide show. These are published under a creative commons license so they are totally legit. If you hold the mouse over the image you’ll see a caption:
There are many more excellent cat photographs and works of art on Pinterest. Have the authors of these works granted permission for the photographs to be shown on Pinterest or in this case on PoC? I doubt it. In fact I am confident they did not.