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Pinterest's Prickly Problem
If you're familiar with Pinterest, online discussions about Pinterest's copyright issues have been heating up recently, and (I believe) I may have mentioned the site on the Flog before. Pinterest is a website and online tool that lets you "pin" images online onto a virtual pinboard on your Pinterest account, and you can create unlimited boards (and pins), amassing (essentially) galleries of images grouped by theme, media, colour, or subject. It's fantastic for idea-gathering; whether you're working on a room design, party plan, or for that matter, a painting or character design. But lately the argument has come up that the site hurts artists and crafters. I'd like to examine that in today's Flog entry.
When I first started using Pinterest, I mostly pinned photographs of interior decor I liked, public domain paintings by dead artists, interesting photo textures and colour combinations, and catalog photos of dresses and fabric I thought were inspiring. (In fact, on one board, I pinned pictures of kimono fabrics and gowns because I planned on putting a fairy in kimono-inspired costume. The end design was my own.)
I still find Pinterest a fantastic tool for artists--if you play by the copyright rules. That is, that you only pin images that the creator has said are OK to be pinned, and if you are using reference photos, the copyright holders of the photos need to be OK with you copying the photos wholesale (or the figures more or less wholesale, in the case of models modeling for artists). Keeping in mind that expressions of ideas in photography, art and writing are automatically copyrighted (whether or not the fancy © sign appears) by the creator, ideas themselves are free--so this applies to things like mood, "feel", colour combinations, and even style--so if you want to paint modern figures in the method of Alphonse Mucha, go for it! I'...
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