I can answer that last one: "Why would a photographer want to shut down someone who is helping to spread the word about their work?"
It's because landlords don't take payment in public appreciation of the tenant's genius. Although it can lead to some odd outcomes, copyright tries to treat expression as territory so that creatives can eat.
That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I can understand why photographers don't want Pinterest profiting off their hard work for exactly bupkis in return.
Last year Computerworld just boosted a photoillustration off my website (the top one here: http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/ ) without payment or proper credit. I didn't say, "Yay, eyeballs." I said, "What assholes," and invoiced them. They paid me $250 and apologized, as they should have.
What happened with Computerworld and what's happening on Pinterest are very different.
From what I gather, Computerworld staff took your photo without permission in order to illustrate a story and profit off of that content via advertising and other means.
Pinterest staff are not taking photos from professional photographers in order to profit from them. Its users are sharing the photos with their friends and are often leaving commentary associated with the photos. As far as I can tell, individual users are not able to profit from their behavior, although there may be a subset of users who are able to profit in some way. It is unknown if Pinterest would be able to directly profit from the pins and comments of users.
I would like to ask: If someone pinned that same photo, what would you do? (sincere question)
The situations aren't particularly different: a for-profit business intends to make money via ads run against content they didn't pay for and are republishing without permission.
The difference being that Computerworld recognizes that they screwed up by letting a freelancer boost an illustration, whereas for Pinterest it appears to be their business model. Also, Pinterest's TOS indicates they are legally hiding behind their users, while Computerworld took responsibility for the freelancer's actions.
I'm not saying this is necessarily illegitimate; one could argue that digital culture makes it necessary to look again at the basic notion of copyright. Or perhaps we need some sort of new metadata that lets creative types say "ok to republish X for promotional purposes". And congrats to the Pinterest team for making something that people like. But in Pinterest's shoes, I would be setting aside money for the inevitable lawsuits.
It's because landlords don't take payment in public appreciation of the tenant's genius. Although it can lead to some odd outcomes, copyright tries to treat expression as territory so that creatives can eat.
That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I can understand why photographers don't want Pinterest profiting off their hard work for exactly bupkis in return.
Last year Computerworld just boosted a photoillustration off my website (the top one here: http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/ ) without payment or proper credit. I didn't say, "Yay, eyeballs." I said, "What assholes," and invoiced them. They paid me $250 and apologized, as they should have.