Y is for Yarn and a Yelp for help

I don’t have any art for this post. I’ve known what I was going to do with Y since day one, but I haven’t gotten to the project as yet and I’m crazily painting my daughter’s mermaid at the moment and don’t want to shift my brain space.

So, what I’m going to do is tell you what I’m going to do.

Do you remember string painting in primary school? Where with a lot of glue, string and mess, you make a picture out of gluing string to paper in patterns. If I recall correctly it was sometimes used to create a print as the string created a raised surface.

For example:

String Printing Plate - Monoprinting LessonString printing plate – Monoprinting Lesson by CJ33 on Flickr.

Well, I was thinking of doing something similar, but not for printing. I have a huge pile of acrylic yarn in multiple colours stashed under my art desk (from my crochet obsession). I was thinking of using those 100% acrylic yarns with my acrylic paints and mediums to create a highly textured (and likely swirly) painting. It would be ooey-gooey as I’m thinking of soaking yarn in gel and experimetning is a variety of ways.

In any case it is on my list of explorations (yes, I have one pinned to my pinboard).

And speaking of pinboards, I want to talk about something that is really concerning me at the moment. In the last few days a fellow blogging friend of mine had a bad experience with Pinterest. Somebody pinned not only her artwork, but many of her general life photos directly from her blog. I found this creepy and don’t blame her for being upset and it got me thinking.

I did a little poking around the net and it appears that although Pinterest maybe a hot spot for popularity, it is also a potential time bomb for legal issues.

I read this and its follow up articles.

I’m not a lawyer, I’m an artist, but there are many scary issues involved in Pinterest and I’m at a quandary as to what to do.

I love Pinterest. It is a great advertising tool, I get lots of traffic from it to my blog thanks to people pinning my work. I’m not really concerned about people pinning my work as long as I’m accredited (doesn’t always happen), but even if I’m not, translating my lousy 700 pixel wide images into the real world to do something with them to make money, not really practical. Sure they can print it small, or they can use it online, and let’s face it, scum are going to be scum, no matter what we do. But I have no problem with my work being pinned…for now.

What I do have a problem with is when I pin others’ work.

Pinning is 99% of the time done without the creator’s permission. Everyone does it. It is what Pinterest was designed for. I’ve been collecting artwork I admire on my Pinterest boards. But if you read the terms of service, you’re not actually allowed to do that. It is a breach of copyright. Technically speaking if you pinned my work without my permission, I could legally sue you for copyright breach/theft. (Please don’t ask me which country, you’ll hurt my brain). And there are plenty of people out there seriously concerned about this.

According to the Pinterest Terms of Service it is the pinner who gets in trouble and pays all the money. So if I pinned your work without your permission, you could sue me.

I don’t have any money!

But I love Pinterest. I really don’t want to delete my Pinterest boards. I have a lovely collection of artworks there of artists I admire. I pinned them thinking that I was doing them a favour, getting traffic to their sites, advertising, all good stuff.

But I did it by making a decision on their behalf that I didn’t have a right to.

Damnit! I wanna pin and play.

Some people are apparently arguing that there is no harm done, but according to many artists there is. Another argument is that if there is no profit being made then there is no harm done. Sure, a pinner might not making a monetary profit, but they are gathering followers who in turn might visit their blog so they gain traffic.  So in a indirect way, they are using other people’s artworks to promote themselves.

Aaaargh! The more I think about this, the more I think I need to delete those boards.

But pinning is fun, I don’t mean any harm!

Thoughts anyone? Help?

I’m considering setting some of my own Pinterest Terms of Use where every pin I make has to have the artist mentioned and directly linked to their website for their promotion. I will limit my pinning from any one artist to a maximum of two works (I pretty much do both of these mostly already…it seemed scummy and a bit ridiculous to pin any more from one artist and totally wrong to not accredit). I will be going through my pinboards and removing any pins I can not fully accredit or link directly to the artist’s website.

A couple of things I could do further is only pin thumbnails of the works I like. But this would require me to copy the work, alter it and upload it manually to Pinterest and that probably has a whole pile of other legal issues attached to it. Perhaps Pinterest should investigate thumbnailing their images like Facebook does.

The most foolproof, but intensely time consuming route would be to contact by email every artist I want to pin. But I want to work on my art, not have a career in pinning.

So should I take the risk that everyone else is currently taking and continue to pin? Or should I remove all the work that is not mine and leave my Pinterest looking like a blatantly boring self promotion site?

What are your thoughts? Do you pin? Do you want your work pinned or not?

And how on Earth does Flickr (which has banned Pinning from its site) and YouTube not breach copyright since they have been obviously promoting sharing for a much longer time? Legal issues hurt my brain.

Best wishes,
Liz
http://www.pinterest.com/lizpowley

See all my Blogging from A to Z posts! Only one more to go!


Comments

8 responses to “Y is for Yarn and a Yelp for help”

  1. My opinion – get away from Pinterest. I don’t belong and sure hope nobody pins my work without permission. I know the internet is what some define as anarchy, but I still believe in fair play ;).
    Stay inspired!

    1. I’m on the verge of getting away. At the very least there are going to be big changes on what I do with it.

      Thanks for reading my big, long, panicked blather 😀

      Best wishes,
      Liz

  2. O_o I think all that just gave me a headache. I don’t know. I’m still having issues with deciding if I should include pictures in my blogs…

    1. Oh yeah, tell me about it. And pictures on blogs…I too was baffled about whether I could do that or not. In the end, I decided to only source from Flickr and YouTube where the authors have the choice as to whether to allow sharing or not. Even then I’m a little nervous and mandatory about including credit, particularly since I really just want to highlight other artists and say how fantab they are.

      Most of the time I stick to my own images. It is safer and feels more right.

      Thanks for dropping by.

      Best wishes,
      Liz

  3. Although I tried pinterest as part of “30 days of creativity” last year, I only pinned my own work and didn’t really get into the whole pinning thing.
    One one hand I see it as a fantastic marketing and promotional tool and believe that corporations are even including “pin it” buttons in advertising.
    On the other hand, and from personal experience, there is a real chance that people will abuse it, pinning images that the owner would not want put on a 3rd party sharing site.
    Really only you can decide what you want to do. I think the chances of repercussions are small. There is no notification if an image belonging to you is pinned, despite there being a link to your website. Unless you stumble upon it or are told, most likely you would never know your images are there.

    1. I don’t know if you know about this, but if you go to a pin and click on it, when it opens to that pin’s page, beneath the pin you can find a reference to the website it was pinned from. If you click on that link, it will take you to a page with all the pins from that website on Pinterest. Check out what has been pinned from my site – http://pinterest.com/source/inspired.gumnut.net/ You can also mostly see who pinned what and when.

      As for repercussions, let’s just say I have an uber-conscience and spend half my life worrying about whether I’m doing the right thing or not. I can be very square sometimes when it comes to doing the right thing.

      And yeah, I want to use it for marketing so people can see my work…that’s one of the reasons I’d like to stay and play, but the other is that it is just fun.

      I’ll just have to decide on what I’m going to do. Decisions aren’t my strong suit 😀

      Thanks for reading my ramble ::hugs::

      Best wishes,
      Liz

      1. Thanks for this tip. I think it might be helpful.

  4. Hey Liz, Can’t wait to see your yarn art. Sounds like it is going to be cool. I too am an avid pinner, And I always make sure my pins lead to the creator’s blog or shop or website. I would like to think that they don’t mind the exposure. -Debbie