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Marketing and Pinterest

By Scott J. Slavick and Andrew J. Avsec

Heralded as the next big thing in social media, Pinterest presents new legal risks for companies engaged in social media marketing. By sharing images and encouraging others to re-pin them, Pinterest users may inadvertently engage in copyright or trademark infringement, violate licensing agreements, or run afoul of U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules for commercial endorsements. Naturally, marketing departments are very interested in Pinterest ' but before you start, consult with your corporate counsel to prevent activity that poses such risks.

Pinterest encourages its users to “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” Unfortunately for Pinterest users, the images of many of these beautiful things are protected by copyright. Courts have found that merely reproducing works, even without distribution to the public, can constitute copyright infringement if the user has neither obtained permission to pin, nor paid a licensing or royalty fee for use of a copyrighted image. If a copyrighted work is infringed, the copyright holder is entitled to damages, the infringer's profits, and possibly statutory damages ranging from $200 to $150,000 depending on the innocence or willfulness of the infringer, according to 17 U.S.C. ' 504.

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