I really don't see how anyone pinning your image can hurt you, even if it comes from a blog somewhere with no link back to you. Doesn't help doesn't hurt...

OK, I'll agree to disagree. To my mind, it's just one more place from where people can lift our images without paying for them. And any repins are more 'steal me' possiblities. I know people can lift them from any legitimate or stolen use, but pinning is just making them easily available to more people.
 I'm aware that people who care can search for CC images from e.g. Flickr. But I'm not convinced most people care that much, they'll just take images from wherever they find them. Most people don't even know that might be wrong (i.e. they might be using images that have not been freely shared). Pinterest just reinforces that mindset.

Your signature says "artistic photography" and I like your work, this is not a personal attack but forgive me for saying it; you don't sound like an artist. You don't sound like someone who works hard to realize a vision, creating something personal and artistic and then seeing it spread out of control on the web until even ownership is lost. You sound like a businessman calculating losses of product and dismissing it as just part of process of marketing your widgets. Sort of like Walmart factors in losses from shoplifting as part of the retail experience.

If I were so rich I wiped my A** with 50 dollar bills I would still have a problem with someone stealing my work. Or sharing it directly from my portfolio on Dreamstime. That's why copyright exists, to protect the rights of artists and creative people.

It's not about the money, it's about MY WORK. That's where the hurt is.

Interesting points you make.  As for the artist thing, well I'd like to think of myself as an artist, I do try very hard to produce artistic photography.  However I also don't really put too much stock in labels.  A label by its very nature is more exclusive than inclusive.  To define something is more often than not to define what it is not, or to put barriers up to what it may be.

It took a great upheaval in mindset for me to start selling my pictures for 25cents each, as I'm sure it did to anyone else here who was already producing professional grade images before getting into microstock.  I had to let go of a lot of restrictive notions about what I believed one of my photos to be worth and you know what?  It was the most liberating thing I've done and the best decision of my careers (I've had several) I've made.

I now live a life of 6 months a year at least (this trip is over 7 months now) travel around Asia, I work when I want to work and take weeks or months off when I feel like it.  I shoot and write what I feel like when I feel like it and earn money after the fact.  I owe all of that to microstock and finally getting over that "these agencies are stealing off the photographers and driving prices down low" mindset and getting into a different one instead, seeing the other side of the coin.

What I love is to make the pictures I want to make, to let inspiration hit where and when it will.  It is the creation the image I love, that and the sharing of it among as many people as possible (something I was doing with my images long before stock - I was posting them to forums, displaying them on photo.net, deviant art, other photography and model/shooter network sites etc) because I think art is to be enjoyed, spread and shared.  Isn't that why it's created, to be enjoyed?  As such I can't see any logic in your "creating something personal and artistic and then seeing it spread out of control on the web until even ownership is lost" viewpoint as if I got some of my work spread that far around that it was admired by that many people and it touched them enough to spread it virally....then I'd call that a major artistic success.  Whether I earn money from it or not, my vision of beauty was shared by the maxium amount of people it could be....what more could a legitimately artistically motivated person want?

In the end if I can shoot what I want to shoot and make enough to get by then I'm happy...and I'm doing that but stock roi on stock IS going down so the reality is that that being the case I kinda HAVE to be a "businessman calculating losses of product and dismissing it as just part of process of marketing your widgets" don't all of us in this industry?  I have to be the businessman so that I CAN keep being the artist.  The businessman always comes second and the artist just wants to see his work touch and be appreciated by others...I see no contradictions there.

"Whether I earn money from it or not, my vision of beauty was shared by the maxium amount of people it could be....what more could a legitimately artistically motivated person want?"

I'm here to make money, not massage my 'artistic' ego by having my work 'shared' (which can damage my income several ways).  My intent is to create highly saleable content that sends a message, while incorporating my creativity into the process.  If I wanted to soley be an 'artist' and share my work to benefit humanity, I'd buy a van so I could live by the river.  I'll stick to that as a hobby if I so want.

And so you should if that is your focus.  I'm not suggesting by that monologue that everyone should be like me, I was merely responding to the previous poster who made some points that really made me think, which I always appreciate.

And I guess we just disagree on what will make you more money.  You seem to think waging a fight in which you'll have as much effect as a gnat chomping on an elephant and scouring the net for improper uses of your images to be more worthwhile than using that time making new ones and engaging in other, positive forms of marking your images, *shrugs* maybe you are right.  I don't see it but whatever blows your whistle...

Sorry, I don't think you read what anyone else writes.  I spend zero time 'scouring the net' for use abuse.  I do spend some time trying to raise awareness of the masses, so as a crowd we can be aware and act against egregious practices if it becomes needed, or at least so others are aware of the dangers.

I can see you believe in what you are saying Sean, and I admire that you do stand up for what you believe in.  So we are on different sides of the fence here, so what?

As for my scouring the net comment, that was extrapolated from something someone else wrote - so forgive me if I'm mistaken about that, I don't spend much time here as my post count would suggest.

But even as I can commend you for you attitude of "spending some time trying to raise awareness of the masses, so as a crowd we can be aware and act against egregious practices if it becomes needed, or at least so others are aware of the dangers." I would question how you can prioritise Pinterest as such a danger while you submit exclusively to the most evil and greedy entity any of us stock photographers have ever had to deal with?

Also isn't it important that we have a balanced view of these "dangers" and that misinformation such as the seo garbage spouted by that article (and others) is corrected so that we can balance the pros and cons fairly?  It feels like a witch hunt in here with a bunch of people getting angry and feeding off each others (at least slightly?) misplaced anger...

It really reminds me actually of several years ago when an istock photographer came into our little modelling photography local forums, when she mentioned she shot for istock she got treated with disdain, contempt and patronising lectures from all the old pros as to how she was giving her work away for far too little, devaluing it and it would end in her ruin, she'd never make any money from microstock.  She goes by the handle Hidesy and probably earns more today from her photography than all her naysayers on that forum combined.  It's easy to get fearful of new technologies that at first seem to be "taking something from us" but just as microstock gave images to people at prices that had never been seen before and full ongoing royalties (most of the old pros used to talk about microstock as "giving your images away for nothing") it also gave a lot back to us that make a living by it.  Microstock was the future of stock - those that saw it early and chose not to fight it but to embrace it got rewarded well for it.  And it's hard to see social media as being anything other than the future of the internet...

My main complaint with Pinterest is that they lend a veneer of legality to essentially giving our work away for free. If someone else tags my work that is in violation of copyright law, but once that happens as far as pinterest is concerned they now have permission to give that work away for free. Unless I find and send a DMCA notice they feel free to give my work away.

I am much less concerned with watermarked images because at least they are obviously from somewhere else.

Right now it is probably mostly people pinning images they like, but at some point in the future it could easily become the go to site for bloggers and web designers looking for free images. Pinterest would be fine with that, we would lose.

The difference with someone right clicking or using a screen shot to get the image to use is that they are actively stealing the image. Pinterest encourages people to pin the beautiful things they see on the web (glossing over the fact that they aren't really allowed to pin anything they don't own copyright to) and then encourages others to use those images they have pinned. Once they have been pinned and re-pinned a few times they can get lost from their original source and essentially become the property of pinterest. If there is a legal problem pinterest will hide behind their TOS and try to blame the original pinners.

As far as the SEO stuff goes, I am not sure that giving away our images to Pinterest is worth the boost in SEO, certainly not without a big fat watermark.

With a few tweaks pinterest could make itself much more friendly to content creators and remove most of my objections, but they don't want to do that.

+1

If that's unbelievable, here's a screendump I did five minutes ago: http://www.lizworld.com/CONCH_No1.jpg.

sorry but with such a long-tail query and the name of a small town it's not surprising it's ranked nr.1, all you need is stuffing the keywords in H1 tags and you will rank fine for a long time, but for less obscure ketwords and locations it's quite another story.