Pinterest: The Next Internet Plague
March 26th, 2012If you thought Facebook was bad, with its plague of widgets and cookies that have polluted the Internet, pinterest.com (which caters mainly to women) is the fastest growing site in history. It’s still in public-beta, which means that it’s not even open to everyone yet.
Via: Scientific American:
Pinterest is surely a rising star. For those of you not in the know, it’s the online equivalent of a bulletin board – a slicker, cleaner way to put together collages of your favorite styles, photographs, design ideas, or dino art. But lately, Pinterest’s terms of service have been garnering a lot of criticism for stating in no uncertain terms that anything you “pin” to their site belongs to them. Completely. Wholly. Forever and for always. Here’s the offending paragraph:
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.
My co-blogger, Glendon, has expounded on why the word “sell” in their terms of service unsettles him. I think there are many, many equally ominous words in that paragraph. Here’s what scares me and why…
