Pinterest Copyright infringement emails

Shop Talk
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This evening, I’ve received multiple emails from Pinterest informing me that pins are being disabled due to copyright infringement. The emails are still arriving as I type!

I’ve done a bit of investigating and all the pins have been reported by the owner, which was a previous folksy seller, who regular posted in the daily listers almost a decade ago… 2016/17. Back then I dutifully pinned the listing they shared, and now she is accusing me of copyright infringement for doing so.

I know our priorities change, and perhaps she feels that she doesn’t want to share her art now, but it’s been really upsetting getting all these accusatory emails. Just wanted to give others the heads up.

Sarah x

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That is weird, I thought that was the whole point of Pinterest that you pinned things.

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Oh no Sarah, that’ll be quite a few of us who used to pin everything back in the day it was a good promotion tool then :frowning: I wonder if her work has been stolen and she’s trying to get all copies taken down to prevent further being taken.

I have archived my art board, I don’t want to delete it as I have a lot of my own art on there that has sold so will leave it hidden for now and transfer what I want to keep to a new board when I have time.

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Exactly, especially when a person has invited you to promote them!

Email excerpt:

“We’re getting in touch to let you know that we have received a copyright infringement report (Copyright Infringement Report 1352141127) and have removed one (or more) of your Pins.

How was this violation identified?
While many copyright owners are happy to have their content on Pinterest, some do not want their content to appear on Pinterest. When a copyright owner sends us a complete and valid report per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it’s our policy to remove the Pin(s).”

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I’m wondering if she doesn’t realise what a serious email the action generates?

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I would have thought if she did not want her creations pinned they should be encoded. The whole point of pinning is to promote other artists.

I would inform Folksy and maybe they can reach out to her, to let her know what is happening.

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Very likely Sarah, I also thought maybe it’s to do with AI using pinned images? Pintrest have been doing a lot more around AI recently, you will be able to turn off so you don’t see AI generated images but it still uses AI to generate recommendations for you which mean it’s interacting more with pinned images to ‘learn’ . They are rolling this out across US and Canada from what I have seen so it’s coming here too at some point.

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It might be that the seller has taken steps to remove their items and images from their website and cleaning up their digital footprint, and they’ve submitted a ‘right to be forgotten’ form to Google which has filtered through to Pinterest (Pinterest may have its own version of the form). The violation notice might therefore be automatic and not from the seller themselves.

I’ve had a few copyright violation notices from Pinterest when I’ve re-pinned artwork onto a mood board or saved an image from a site and then later on, the artist has decided they don’t want their stuff on Pinterest (perhaps due to its AI training feature, perhaps other people were claiming the work as their own or making collages or edits with the image without permission, maybe a gallery was cracking down on where images of artwork can be accessed, who knows).

I had a couple of stomach-drop ‘what have I possibly done wrong?’ moments at first but nothing further came of the notices. If you pinned an image from Folksy in good faith nine years ago, I don’t think you have anything to lose sleep over.