I started play­ing around with Pin­ter­est today. I’d heard about the ser­vice from a few friends: the basic idea is that you cre­ate “boards” and you pin inter­est­ing things to them. It sounded to me like a very visual Del.icio.us with a lit­tle extra social to boot. I signed up.

Later in the day, after pin­ning a few things, some of it my work, some of it jstuff from around the web, Matt Per­rin sent me to this arti­cle that explained the fine print in the Terms of Service:

As usual, the devil is in the details. Today, the ‘details’ are Pin­ter­est oper­a­tor Cold Brew Labs’ terms of ser­vice. And by ‘devil’ I mean the fol­low­ing two excerpts:

By mak­ing avail­able any Mem­ber Con­tent through the Site, Appli­ca­tion or Ser­vices, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a world­wide, irrev­o­ca­ble, per­pet­ual, non-exclusive, trans­fer­able, royalty-free license, with the right to sub­li­cense, to use, copy, adapt, mod­ify, dis­trib­ute, license, sell, trans­fer, pub­licly dis­play, pub­licly per­form, trans­mit, stream, broad­cast, access, view, and oth­er­wise exploit such Mem­ber Con­tent only on, through or by means of the Site, Appli­ca­tion or Ser­vices.

In the fol­low­ing para­graph, Pin­ter­est asks me, the user, to affirm that, …

… you rep­re­sent and war­rant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclu­sive owner of all Mem­ber Con­tent that you make avail­able through the Site, Appli­ca­tion and Ser­vices or you have all rights, licenses, con­sents and releases that are nec­es­sary to grant to Cold Brew Labs the rights in such Mem­ber Con­tent, as con­tem­plated under these Terms.

This both­ers me on two lev­els. The first is obvious…I don’t want to give these guys per­mis­sion to use or resell my work. Not with­out get­ting a cut.

The sec­ond part is the non­sen­si­cal nature of the terms when you con­sider the pur­pose of the ser­vice. The most com­mon way to use Pin­ter­est is not to pin your own work, but to pin some­one else’s. Judg­ing by the sec­ond bold para­graph, by pin­ning a site’s con­tent, I am telling Cold Brew Labs that I own it, and that as the owner, I grant them the right to use. alter, sell, the work.

So…if I am read­ing this cor­rectly, if I go to Chuck Wendig’s site, and I pin one of his essays using Pin­ter­est, I’m stat­ing that I own his essay and that I am going to let Cold Brew Labs use, sell, change it with­out Chuck’s per­mis­sion and/or knowledge.

If I were Chuck, I’d totally kick my ass for such a thing. And I’d be right to do so.

Tell me I’m read­ing this wrong, will you? Tell me I’m in a froth over noth­ing. I cer­tainly hope so. To think that there is such bla­tant stu­pid­ity in the world mas­querad­ing as a use­ful and some­what fun web­site would almost, but not really, break my lit­tle heart.

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.