The attribution is not next to the image. A pinterest user would have to click on the picture to be taken to flickr and see the author/username. But how many people will do that if the photo is right there, full size, for viewing/downloading/repinning right on the pinterest page?
Most photographers who publish on flickr have a keen interest in their stats: how often their pictures have been viewed etc. With pinterest, the flickr stats do not reflect reality anymore. Thousands of users could enjoy and share the image on pinterest without the author ever knowing about it.
No image on the web is safe from copying, but I find it strange that pinterest makes a copy of the image and chooses to show it without clear, evident author attribution (including the "All Rights Reserved" notice, if applicable) when Flickr allows hotlinking and provides an easy api to pull the author and license information.
I think that if Pinterest would put a concerted effort in to automated attribution that would be highly commendable.
It should be noted that while it's the right thing to do, and that it would be in Pinterest's best interest in the long run, no one has held Reddit or Metafilter or any similar site to such a standard. Artist attribution on Reddit has always been enforced by the community with less-than-stellar results.
What's interesting about this situation from a social point of view is looking at the differences between a Pinterest pin and an Imgur upload.
Giving attribution to imgur would be pointless as it is not a site known for original works. My guess is, the percentage of original images uploaded to imgur by the author is a small percentage.
What makes the connection between pinterest and flickr so interesting to me is that (if I remember correctly) A THIRD of pinterest images come from flickr, and pinterest thrives on using flickr's awesome repository of images against the law and the spirit under which most of the images were uploaded.
I believe I know why they are not hotlinking... if they did, they would immediately get a sh!!load of complaints from flickr authors about their images being used that way. (As anyone can attest who ever hotlinked flickr images on their sites, even WITH author attribution.)
If I were flickr, I would implement a feature "Your image has been pinned on pinterest!" with a notice that the views on pinterest will not register in the flickr stats, and allow the author to send a take-down notice to pinterest by pushing a button.
I meant that people upload pictures to Pinterest and they upload pictures to Imgur, but no one would ever worry about the images they uploaded to Imgur, because it's so anonymous.
I think Pinterest has managed to attract a different crowd from Reddit/4chan. For Pinterest users, it isn't so important to know that at any moment you can retreat behind a cloak of anonymity, whereas Redditors and 4chan users regard it as a fundamental human right.
I'm glad you commented though, I agree with what you're saying and I had no idea about flicker users having a history of people pulling their stuff. That definitely changes the game.
It's not about the amount of information you take in, but about how much you identify with it.
You can hear all day long about how much money other people make, but if you take it merely as a fact and do not construct a personal identity/story from it ("I am upset because others earn more than me", "Life is unfair" etc.), the information will not affect your happiness at all.
I believe the article is flawed as it seems to require of us to artificially restrict the amount of information we are exposed to, when the key is to manage one's perception of the information.
Seems that many Chinese have developed a strong "Keeping up with the Joneses" mentality lately; I would suspect that is the source of the unhappiness, rather than the wiring in their new homes.
Just checked... pinterest creates a copy of the medium-size image and stores it on their own servers. Users can view and re-pin it without seeing the context and author. Very surprising to me, and not cool.
It's a valid point, downvoters. I think that having to ask permission to link an image inline is pretty silly - the responsible thing to do would be to rehost it in some manner and then link the rehosted version.
Screwed if you do (accused of breaking "copyright"), screwed if you dont (accused of "stealing" bandwidth).
I guess I don't see how copyright applies to publicly viewable images online that are being used for non-commercial purposes. Certainly someone can link to that page, and anyone could see the image. It seems to come down to "credit", and there should be a link to the original content.
The internet is pretty much built around the idea of finding interesting things in other places online and then sharing that. In fact, Google made a very profitable business just following and index those links to other content. The point of pinterest is to share interesting visual pieces. So a textual link doesn't do as much as showing a thumbnail. But it's still the same basic concept. Just as blogs expose links to interesting articles, so too does pinterest expose interesting pictures. In both cases, if you like the original what you see, you should be able to visit the original author/creator's page to check out more.
I see this as about as reasonable as blocking links on a blog. Don't publish articles online if you don't want people to link to them. Don't publish photos online if you don't want people to link to them (or share smaller thumbnails). If someone takes your article/photo and claims credit for it, then you have a valid argument. But if someone's whole "crime" is to enjoy your content enough to share it and advertise for you, a "thank you" would be more appropriate than arguing that they're infringing your copyright.
Copyright does apply (but only because they copy the image - even if a scaled version - to their servers and serve from there). Whether it should is a different issue.
My account is semi-fake, with a real pic and a few friends, but my birthday in 1920.
It's great, except for those annoying "Never too old for love" and "Mature Singles" ads.
For sure. Big industry names don't assimilate; they mold their environment to what they know (and they usually bring other people with them who come from the same place). Because of their clout, few will dare to disagree with them.
It is amazing how quickly a company's ecosystem can change when you bring in a big name from a different environment.
Working at a startup is obviously very different from working in a corporate environment. You have to thrive on risk and be so passionate about new technologies that you can't help but learn all that stuff and chomp at the bit to use it.
I can't imagine working at Microsoft and NOT having learned HTTP, Razor, MVC 3, ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, Facebook Connect, Twitter API, SQL at this point. It is stunning how much a single person can get done these days thanks to all the cool technologies that have come along in the last few years. If that guy is truly dying to join a startup, why doesn't he have his own side project yet?
I think Calbucci is just trying to find people with true passion. I would definitely worry that this person moves on to a job with more $$$ if the startup isn't a huge success right out of the gate. After all, financial motivations are keeping him at his current job right now.
The founder probably took a 100% paycut to get it started. I don't think it's too much to ask for someone to take a financial risk to come onboard; especially when it's before launch, which means their cash flow is probably close to $0. Obviously, these kinds of decisions are not for everyone. But, when you're truly passionate, it's not really a choice at all.
This is one of the points Marcello is making. I have almost 20 years experience, spent 5 years at Microsoft, 18 months on the .Net framework team before it released, and have yet to write a line of code for the web.
The vast majority of work at MS is not web based, its API, OS, Dev Tools, Server, etc ... And devs are very much in silos. (IOW they 'own' a specific piece of functionality within their product.)
Internal Tool devs on the other hand ... Internal Tool teams are run very much like startups and many fail. ;)
BTW there is a lot of grey here, its not black and white. There are many devs at MS that do side projects and contribute to OSS. Many do this work off the MS stack.
If you are going to take lower income in exchange for increased risk, why take that risk with someone like Marcello? Why not find a talented PM and biz guy and come up with your own product idea?
as much as I am passionate about developing I share same passion to be paid fairly. I love what I do but that doesn't mean I will do it for you free or with huge discount.
It really adds up for a large thread.