Oh, I know Pinterest is already working, and quickly, on the big problems they have been having with copyright issues…so deleting my account wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to rumors of lawsuits or anything like that.
But I was never comfortable using Pinterest…often because I would look at someone else’s pin, trying to find the source for an image (because I want to know who made it), and there wouldn’t be any information or links back to the original. There were just too many unacknowledged images on my boards, too many re-pins that, when I looked into it, didn’t have attribution. It was such a mess (and I was so mortified that I had been doing this to other people’s images!) that I deleted my account tonight. It just seemed easier than going through all my pins, deleting the ones I couldn’t trace to source.
I’ll wait till Pinterest has sorted its shit out before starting up again. So sorry to all the Pinterest followers I’m dropping, but I’d hate to think I encouraged anyone to re-pin an unattributed image that I’d used wrongly.
To be quite honest, I wasn’t using it very much anymore; I found all those images overwhelming. Spend too much time looking at other people’s original work and you might not be able to come up with your own! It was like being raped in the eyeballs by Pantone swatches: cupcakes, quilts, wedding decorations, dresses…all higgledy-piggledy and terribly, well, preoccupied with the acquisition of consumer goods, and with self-delusion: “If I can’t own it, at least it’s mine on Pinterest!”
I found that looking for too long made me start to want things…things that I didn’t need, that I didn’t even really want, that wouldn’t make me happier than I am, and that, when I finally got my hands on them, I probably wouldn’t use after the two-week shiny-new-toy phase had passed. It just does that to you…convinces you that you want/need all this…stuff! There were some good things, of course, but most of it was just ordinary junk, but in pretty colors. Blargh, I’d kill myself if I had more than two things together in one room that used the rainbow as a color scheme. I’m not even sure that the rainbow can be called a colour scheme*…when you’re 14, the rainbow is a color scheme. But I’m not 14. Anymore. And I’m so glad my mom refused to paint my bedroom walls with balloons arranged in rainbow stripes, when I was!
*it’s a spectrum…you’re meant to choose a few hues, and leave the rest. That is a scheme.
As for my own images, I wish I could say something cool about the Creative Commons permission I put on my online images, but it’s all pretty straightforward and uninteresting. Share alike. Attribution would be mighty decent of you. Non-commercial, though I’ll be honest and tell you I can’t be arsed to enforce anything, legally. I did, however, tell a woman to “drop dead” in 2003, and she obliged the next morning. Also, I put on a curse on someone in highscool, and her partner recently killed himself, I was told. Just sayin’. *laughs*
Banksy was cool before anyone else, and nobody does the Copyleft magnanimity better than he does. You’ll find this gem on his website, under the ironically-titled ‘Shop’ heading:
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- How to Block Pinterest Pins of Your Copyright Images (quickonlinetips.com)
- Pinterest Could Have Trouble From Getty Images (webpronews.com)
