Monday, September 24, 2012

Zero Tolerance For Desperate Hipsters


My Hipsters screenshot has Hitler with headphones.
Probably not the best of omens.


Hipsters.com is just another unabashed Pinterest knockoff that's been foistered on the internet by parasite Sumon Rahman who has purchased one of the many "Pinterest-In-A-Can" programs available and installed it on a server. The knockoff even has red pin icons, and the "organize and share things you love" motto. The funny thing about this one is that Mr. Rahman created a Hipster.com page on Wikipedia, that was promptly deleted by the Wikipedians, who are not known to take guff from self-marketers.

Crowdsourced content scraping could have been invented 15 years ago, but it wasn't. Back then, webmasters had respect for copyright. Probably not because of some knowledge of the law, but rather, basic human decency. Whatever scraping activity there was, it was never conceived as legitimate, possibly not even by those that perpetrated it.

It took someone like Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, who is, in my opinion, an extraordinarily amoral, unscrupulous and shameless individual to breach through this culture of human decency and blaze the trail for his Cult of Image Copyright Infringement. His hideous contribution to the web is crowdsourced scraping.

And this is the reason why I have introduced you to yet another Pinterest clone. To drive the point home that some artists may be resigned to Pinterest's existence, stoically taking another hit to their ability to make a living, shrugging it off and moving on, letting themselves be mollified with nopin metatags, contented with a nofollow link and attribution, deluding themselves with the hope that Pinterest can be used as a promotion tool: these artists fail to see into the future. A future where not ONE successful copyright infringement platform need be contended with, but hundreds and hundreds; some even worse than Pinterest like Spark, that scrapes both images and text at once.

There must be zero tolerance for crowdsourced scrapers. There is no room for reluctant "I guess it's OK if..." - there ought to be no "ifs." Zero tolerance.

2 comments:

bhbphotos said...

Did you take a look at this page http://hipsters.com/pages/read?page_id=115

It is taken word for word from Pinterist

A Glass Artist said...

Pinterest ought to expect to become a victim of the culture of copyright violation that they've helped to promote with their platform.