Good points, James, especially on the making money part. Reminded me of the points the founder of Pinboard (the premium online bookmarking service) made in Don’t Be A Free User.

Impressive legal language in that outtake there, by the way. Sucks.

If you read Pinterest’s terms, 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.”

You also represent that you own copyright on anything you post, but how many people care who owns the copyright on the images they post on Pinterest? Pretty much no-one, but I bet the owners of that material do.

A point I’ve made a number of times is to look at the money – nothing is ever free. If there are no ads on Pinterest they’ll be making money another way, and it only takes a quick look at the source to see it’s Skimlinks. If I were Pinterest I’d be looking to sell user data onto ad exchanges too – they know what people are interested in from the names of their boards, they know what they like from what they re-pin, and they’ve got enough scale to mine that data really nicely and make a load of cash off the back of it.

But then who really wants pretty things to make money eh?