Forget “Linsanity”.  “Pinsanity” has officially taken over the internet.  I speak, of course, about the latest social media craze; www.pinterest.com.  It seems everyone these days is surfing the internet and pinning photos of clothes, cute pets, recipes and just about anything else you can imagine to their digital bulletin boards.  www.pinterest.com has become one of the top 10 social networking sites, but now cold water is being thrown in its face with accusations of copyright infringement.

You see, most of the photos being pinned belongs to someone else, which could violate the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  The site’s Terms of Service are clear, but some industry leaders suggest that 98% of the materials being posted are in direct violation of those terms.  What’s a website to do?  www.pinterest.com does have a way for someone to report unlicensed use of material, but appears to do very little in policing the site itself. 

To help deflect some of the criticism, www.pinterest.com is now providing websites with code that will block people from being able to pin material.  They also limit pin captions to 500-characters to stop people from stealing blog posts.   www.pinterest.com has another advantage in that the posts can drive traffic back to the original source and are letting publishers embed a “Pin It” button directly on their website, which is a virtual permission slip for people to share content. 

Still, not everyone is happy and one wonders if www.pinterest.com will fall of the way of other sites like Napster.