ITM 350 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz
25 May 2018
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ITM 350 – Concepts of e-business
Case 1 Analysis
Pinterest Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.
Key issues
One of the issues in the case is issue of copyrights infringement. This is an issue for Pinterest
because the business model that Pinterest’s uses possible violates other people’s copyrights and
violates its terms of service by posting images/videos without their permission. Pinterest’s Terms
of Service puts the responsibility on its users to stop. “The site knowingly facilitates such actions
by, for example, providing a Pin It tool embedded in the user’s browser toolbar” (Laudon, C., &
Traver 2017). Pinterest has provided 2 options, first an opt-out code to enable other sites to bar
its content from being shared on Pinterest and second, by adding citations from where the
content is from (such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc). Pinterest also had an agreement with
Getty Images where they agreed to provide citations for their content being used and were even
ready to pay a fee. It also conforms with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is an act
that requires to remove any image or video that violate copyright. An example of an issue earlier
in 2014, a photographer Christopher Boffoli filed a federal lawsuit against Pinterest for people
using his pictures on Pinterest by re-pinning without his permission.
Another issue in this case relating to Pinterest is that it is not safe to spams. Security analysts say
that Pinterest needs to improve its system to avoid scammers and to “warn users to be wary of
requests to pin content before viewing it and to be suspicious of “free” offers, surveys, and links
with questionable titles” (Laudon, C., & Traver, 2017). Pinterest has said they know about this
issue and are ready to tackle it by improving its technology to avoid scammers. They even took
an approach to this in 2015 by migrating its web site to the HTTPS protocol, which provides
more security. Pinterest also installed a program known as Stingray which enables it to quickly
react to spam, and created a program which pays white hackers to discover security issues. What
Pinterest can do is adapt/install more cookies, “they are small text files deposited by web site on
user’s computer to store information about user, accessed when user next visits web site” (Shah,
2017). Cookies help personalize web site experience and can pose privacy threat which would be
helpful to the Pinterest website and help users recognise threats.
Relevance to course concepts
In this case, a very well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and
Bessemer Venture Partners, hedge fund Valiant Capital Partners, and the Japanese company
Rakuten have poured $1.3 billion in venture capital into Pinterest. Many other companies have
invested into these such as Facebook, Twitter, and many other start-up companies. Venture
capitalist are investors who invest in other people’s money, who provides capital to Startup
ventures or supports small companies that wish to expand. Angel investors is an individual
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