Pin & Post Respectfully

I love using Pinterest along with 25 million others. But as Pinterest's popularity has grown exponentially it has become a place to curate images as well as divert traffic to respective blogs. Because the world wide web is a free-for-all of images and links it's easy to pin things without the original source, steal ideas and magically make it your own. Now that I'm trying to blog consistently, it has come to my attention that there must be a certain etiquette for pinning and posting alike. It's important to be respectful of other's work whether it be a recipe, photograph or design.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Pinterest which informed me that one of my pins was removed from a board because the artist requested it to be taken from Pinterest altogether, not necessarily because of my specific pin.

"While many copyright owners are happy to have their content Pinned on Pinterest, we recognize that some do not want their content to appear on Pinterest. Where, as here, a copyright owner notifies us that they want their content removed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), it is our policy to remove the allegedly infringing Pin, as well as all other Pins that contain the same content if the copyright owners so chooses."

Since Pinterest assured me I'm "blameless" I didn't think anything of it.  Later on I happened to follow the LINKwithlove button on My Scandinavian Home. What's that?

"LINKwithlove is the idea that we, the internet, can teach and learn respect when dealing with intellectual property* online. It is our dream that art, music, photography, words, design, ideas, etc - be shared in a way that is ethical, respectful, educated and kind."

Well, that sounds like a good practice. We've been taught all throughout school to "cite your sources!", "use correct citations!"; using the internet shouldn't be different. Now I cringe in horror to think of how many of pins are not from their original source, and it's not because I'm trying to pass off an idea as my own, but because it's so easy to do! Repinning something takes seconds. So now I will take the care to investigate a few more clicks away to find the original creator of my pins. And similarly in posting...

I scanned through my posts and realized there were a few un-credited photos that I claimed from Google image search. Going one step further to find the source took me mere minutes. Citing images is straight forward, but what about ideas? In a recipe for Strawberry Basil Bruschetta, I reference that I found the recipe from Whole Foods, then proceeded to make it. Of course I executed it a little differently, which is how we learn. And in this way the reader of my post gets the benefit of both recipes; maybe, for them, one method works better than the other.

Adventurenaut

Whole Foods

It also makes me think about people using my images. I've put up some illustrations and I plan to continue doing that. I guess in my head, I assume that potentially everyone can see and download whatever I upload to the internet. That goes for posting on personal sites like Facebook too. I think I'll start putting a little copyright in the corner, if anything to serve as a friendly reminder, because it's just as easy to crop it out. Here's a post from Living Locurto on the affect Pinterest has on how she blogs.

It's not the most exciting topic, but it's something we need to think about since we are living a digital world, sorry Madonna. The internet is an endless wealth of knowledge and is a fantastic place for sharing and learning from one another, but we all just need to remember to give credit where credit is due.