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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

How do you see the issue of possible copyright infringement when self-hosting pinterest clone? Normally, if you republish copyrighted photo (even smaller version), you might get accused of stealing it - you are basically posting a resized version of a photo, which might not be fair use.

Pinterest can get around this by claiming that it was the user who pinned the photo, not them, and they also allow websites to opt-out from pinning (and some websites like National Geographic actually do that). But if you self-host, you are responsible for what is posted...

I am asking because, if I could legally run a website where I would publish smaller version of any photo I find on the Internet, then well, there's a great monetization potential there. But I don't think it would be so easy.

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Apparently pinterest does it via <meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

You could honor a 'content="nopin"'. It's be interesting if that became a standard (similar to nofollow or robots.txt).

[1] https://help.pinterest.com/entries/21063792-How-to-prevent-p...

Ok, let's say I will honor nopin. But isn't the legality still in question, since it is not user-submitted content? Or can I be safe when the pins will be "small enough"?

Well that's sort of the point of Pinry. We don't have to deal with it, it's up to the individual who hosts their own Pinry. We don't maintain that user's servers or have anything to do with it. If you want a completely private Pinry you can and then no one will ever question copyrighted photos because no one but you will see it.

If someone has a copyright complaint with a public Pinry it will need to be directed at that individual because we really have no control over it and even if we did honor something like a nopin tag it's open source, it'll just get removed if someone wants to post copyrighted material.

Yes, I understand that you are not responsible for that, and can't deal with it. I am just pondering whether it is possible to legally run Pinry-powered website, when I myself will be the only user and will want to pin also copyrighted content.

And if not, what do you think would be a typical usecase, i.e. who would want to run Pinry-powered website?

Personally I have a Pinry board that I host privately amongst my company, we all post images/inspiration for sites/ui we find around the web and it's all password protected. Copyrighted content isn't an issue cause only 4 of us ever see it.

But this is the same question you should have for a Blog I'd think, if you host copyrighted content on a blog then you'll have the same issues if it's a public blog.

If you are the only user, it is technically impossible for you do violate copyright, because you aren't publishing anything to anyone, you are just consuming content provided to you.

If you are permitted to download, you are permitted to move the dowoaded file around for yourself.

"...if I could legally run a website where I would publish smaller version of any photo I find on the Internet..."

Doesn't Google/Bing do this with their image search?

Well, they actually copy and host almost the entire internet, without permission. But maybe that's another story.

They will respect requests to not index an image, if their fair use is challenged.

On Pinterest, while they have a safe harbor according to the DMCA, the user can be sued by the copyright holder, just like here.

In practice, I suspect most copyright holders will send a DMCA takedown anyway, either to you or to the company hosting the site, if you're on a VPS or PaaS service.

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