Shhhhhhhh!  Don't tell anyone but....I have a Twitter account.  Yep, it's true.  The "anti-social-media" artist of the www does have a "T" account.  But not for the reasons you might think.  It's a private account used solely for keeping tabs on techie news items, world news and sports and such.   

I don't use it much but I had to open it recently so I could see what this Pinterest debate was about.  Someone "pinned" some of my things a while back.  At first I thought, "how nice"....  Now?  I'm not so sure.   Anyway, for the time being, no one can "pin" anything of mine here on my site or blogs.  I installed the "nopin" code snippet on my blogger account and another one here on my website...so, no pinning allowed, at least not until I get some things figured out. 

No, I'm not going to get into a long discussion on this.  But here are a few of articles on the subject:

Brian Sherwin's article has some interesting info.

So does Katherine Tyrrell's.

And here's one by a photographer/lawyer explaining why she deleted her Pinterest account.

The problem?   It's as old as the web itself....image theft/copyright infringement.  Pinterest does facilitate posting images from other sites...without asking permission.  It makes it very easy to do so. 

I know all about this stuff, though.  Early on, I made it part of my mission to see whether online images could be protected from pilfering.  I saw many "tricks" used by webmasters...and defeated them all.  The best one used tiny thumbnails that only popped larger images when you hovered your mouse over them.  No matter how hard you tried, you just couldn't save that full image.  It ALWAYS disappeared the moment the mouse was moved.  Clever.  But not clever enough to stop me.   

Another one I liked...the transparent gif overlay.  When you'd right-click to save the image, it always looked like you got it.  That is, until you went back to enjoy the stolen image.  What the....?  There's nothing there!  Ahh, the IE Temp Internet Files Folder to the rescue.  Bingo!  A treasure trove of full sized .jpgs.

The most recent one I like?  It's a slide show feature.  No right-clicking possible. On this particular one, a screen capture is about the only option available.  But this stupid slide show has "next" and "prev" buttons that interfere with the images.  A screen capture would only capture those too...  but Firefox has an interesting "view page source" feature.  Voila!  It's like magic....if you know what' you're doing.   

Press down and hold "Alt 0169" anyone? ©