Copyright Culture of Pinterest

Since I am using Pinterest as my curation tool, I wanted to look into the issue of Pinterest's copyrights. It's kind of a mess, not going to lie.

Courtesy of Pinterest-Anti-Christ from commons.wikimedia.org

Just looking at the terms of service this is what the user agrees to when they pin their own stuff:

How Pinterest and other users can use your content
You grant Pinterest and its users a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, store, display, reproduce, re-pin, modify, create derivative works, perform, and distribute your User Content on Pinterest solely for the purposes of operating, developing, providing, and using the Pinterest Products. 

So, if you put it up for use on your own Pinterest account, just know it has a pretty open creative commons license. Not bad, right?

Waiting Out the Copyright Crisis

Creative Commons License, by AJ Cann

My argument is that the solution to the copyright crisis is in allowing copyright law to drown in its own obsolescence as we move on in creating meaningful, integrative, world-changing content that is connected, open, and free. It's taken me a little while to really come to that stance, but in any case, the Copyright Law Panel at BYU on the 25th of October gave me the chance to deliberately think about copyright and thus helped me to come to this conclusion. I think that with time, we will build up a large enough creative commons base that we won't any longer need to lean on copyrighted materials as a primary foundation for modern media arts and digital studies.

Well, to start off, do copyrights have a place in society? Yes. Absolutely, in my book. While I most certainly agree that there are other ways of making money than by copyrighting material, I think there are some really good justifications for short-term content ownership and capitalization. Whether that means five years or ten or even fifteen, I'm not really sure, but what I do know is that if copyright law does end up getting a makeover, it's still probably going to be a pretty ugly beast.