Mark McGuinness posted a great article on the Pinterest for artists issue, Pinterest: an Opportunity for Creators – or a Threat?. A lot of good points there, but do not stop with the article itself or with links to posts in other art marketing blogs about Pinterest. There is a lengthy and insightful discussion in the comments very well worth reading (I could not help but add my $0.02 too).
To me, the amount of attention that Pinterest is getting is amazing. How comes that images of artworks have been shared everywhere for a long while now, from Facebook to Tumblr, often without artist’s consent, and nobody made a big deal out of it? Or did opponents of image sharing only now caught up to the new reality? Is it really such a big deal? Pins are small, unfit for reproduction, even on a very amateurish level. Plagiarism concerns? Artists risk that every time they put their creation on display. Traffic stealing? Now that was probably the most unusual claim I’ve heard, complete with the total lack of supporting facts. Puzzling…
Thanks Yelena. And yes, the comments were great – blind alleys aside!
I’ve wondered about Pinterest myself so it was interesting to read your thoughts. I’m not on Pinterest but I do enjoy looking at it occasionally. I understand artists being worried about theft but unless I’m missing something the pins have the source attached to them. It seems like a better system than people just lifting things and re-using them anonymously!
Thank you for visiting my blog. I love your work!
Thank you for your kind words about my work, Laurie. I am happy to discover your blog too, you have a wonderful style 🙂
You are right, usually pins have the source mentioned. But that source is not always the artist’s original web page. Images travel over the web in mysterious ways, get saved to people’s computers, uploaded to social places from there. Many times there is no easy way to find out who the artist is because the image has no credit associated with it. There is always Google Images to consult of course, but who has the time to do it with every interesting image, right? To some, an image without a credit looks like a fair game for anything up to taking a credit for it which of cousre is harmful for the artist. To me, worrying about services like Pinterest is wasted time and energy. Anybody can grab your images right from your web site, no additional service needed to snatch control right out of your hands, ain’t anything you can do about it.