“Your content.
Pinterest allows you to pin and post content on the Service, including photos, comments, and other materials. Anything that you pin, post, display, or otherwise make available on our Service, including all Intellectual Property Rights (defined below) in such content, is referred to as “User Content.” You retain all of your rights in all of the User Content you post to our Service.

How Pinterest and other users can use your content.
Subject to any applicable account settings you select, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, display, reproduce, re-pin, modify (e.g., re-format), re-arrange, and distribute your User Content on Pinterest for the purposes of operating and providing the Service(s) to you and to our other Users. Nothing in these Terms shall restrict Pinterest’s rights under separate licenses to User Content. Please remember that the Pinterest Service is a public platform, and that other Users may search for, see, use, and/or re-pin any User Content that you make publicly available through the Service.”

This is from the document current as of April 6, 2012. The wording is different-it does not now claim the right to sell, or exploit, your content.

All that said, I am respectful of your concern (as you well know). I continue to use the site as it is such a treasure trove and a great place to organize my creativity (NAYY).

Some bloggers post images that are watermarked, which is easy to do, and that is another way of identifying your own. Well-intentioned people will not go to the trouble of removing watermarks to post on a social site, and serious image-thieves are unlikely to target personal blogs. They open websites like Pininterest, instead.

Pininterest will have a huge battle on their hands if they try to use those second-party, third-party, and so on images. But they shouldn’t even be claiming ownership of first-party image posts. And it shouldn’t take a lawsuit to change that.

A commenter here mentioned that she had posted an image of mine on Pininterest, and I asked her to remove it (explaining my concerns, of course), which she did immediately. That’s really the answer; it’s making sure that people really understand what happens with those images.

Even well-intentioned people use photos from other blogs and websites without realizing that they are stepping across a line. What if one of those well-intentioned people post a photo on Pinterest that they found on someone else’s blog or website, like the photos from Anthropologie? Once it’s out there, it’s out there. One of the biggest problems I’ve read about Pinterest is that photos are losing their original ownership documentation.

Staying off Pininterest is the best, immediate, plan. I like that option a lot, personally. Also publicizing these sleazy practices.

You’re right that Facebook has similarly unethical policies, but, sheesh, is there ANY excuse for not knowing what sleazeballs the owners of Facebook are? They’ve compromised their users in every possible way, and the firestorm over their “privacy” (and other) policies are all over the Internet. FB depends on the ignorance of the vast majority of their users, many of whom seem to go nowhere else on the internet. It’s working for them, so far. No doubt Pininterest found the sleaze inspiring. I’m hoping people tempted by Pininterest will take a good look at what’s involved before they agree to that ridiculous EULA.