Caveat Pinner

 Recently, I enthusiastically extolled the virtues of Pinterest. Pinterest is a social media site where you create virtual bulletin boards and share them with followers. As you surf the web, you pin pictures of things you like to your bulletin board. You can also view your followers boards and pin their pictures to your bulletin. It's a happy, little time waster.
I created boards for color inspiration, ideas for gardening, collecting quotes, but over the past few days, I've read several articles about Pinterest's use and terms of service that have waved red flags. PCWorld and artist, Traci Bunker are two of the articles I read. The issue that sets off whistles is copyright.
Pinterest encourages users to pin images to bulletin boards. The image is snagged with the URL of its source to give credit. Sounds harmless enough until you look at the fine print.

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.

You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services. Accordingly, 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

Bascially, users grant Cold Brew Labs, the company that owns Pinterest, exclusive right to the images posted to do with as they wish. And users are responsible for any copyright infringements, not Cold Brew Labs. Did a chill just run down your spine? It did mine.

Pinterest has offered a "fix" if you don't want your images to be pinned. Add this line of code to the header on your website:

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin"/>

Users will see "This site doesn't allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!" The fix will  prevent most pinners from taking content, but won't prevent all as there are ways around the code.

For now, I've deleted my Pinterest account. If I want some gardening ideas, I'll do it the old-fashioned way and browse through copies of Better Homes Than Yours.