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Why is Pinterest plagiarist and Google is not? From your text it seems that Google owned that images in the first place.

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The distinction is that Google (usually) is a useful tool; you can get to the source of the image from it.

It’s less about plagiarism, more about a dead end vs. a stepping stone.

Is Pinterest not a useful tool? I would say that it probably generates a lot of value for its hundreds of millions of users, and that value does not come from the source of the image, but of the image itself, and its relation to other similar images.

It's not one bit useful for people busy searching an image that they SEO their way above other images, only to be met with a login wall I'm not gonna fill out.

Pinterest is useful for the purpose you describe but what seems to have happened is they are dominating organic search for images in contravention of google's own guidelines.

All things being equal, Pinterest should have been penalised into non-existence by now?

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