Pin Database alternative? What do you think?
It's odd you say Pinpics owns the images. When I tried to submit my app to the Apple apps store, they said Disney owned the artwork of the pin and therefore the image of the pin, no matter who took it, was copyrighted by Disney. But I do know Pinpics is taking off who sumitted the photo to try to say it is there's. If they did leave who took the photo then that person could simply say ok and we could go.
PinPics doesn't _OWN_ the images, but you grant them full copyright to do what they want with them by uploading them. The original photographer still retains the same copyright and he/she can also grant copyright use to anyone else. Having the original img from your camera (which will be much larger than what PP has), and especially the actual pin photographed, would be more than enough to prove the image is yours. Most of the images they have of my pins I Emailed to them. As such, I still have the original 'sent' Email to prove it, and since it was Emailed it probably doesn't apply to their 'terms of service', since I wasn't logged in when I Emailed them (and, in fact, I don't even need an account to Email them pics). And they don't send you copy of the TOS when you Email stuff to them...
Copyright for any for-profit purpose is very tricky. If I take the picture, I own the copyright to that _picture_. But, of course, I don't own the copyright of what was photographed. _Both_ the photographer and the copyright owner of what was photographed would have to clear the sale of that photograph in any capacity to be legal (thus Apple not allowing you have your own photographs of copyrighted material.)
I would think, if Disney wanted to, they could go after PinPics and make them take down photographs of all Disney copyrighted content, especially since in order to view certain images of the copyrighted content you have to pay them money. Or maybe they have cleared it with Disney, who knows...
I think if you can get the basic info, we could come up with a new system if we wanted, but referencing Pinpics numbers is fine. We can have our own arbitrary list of numbers if we want and just reference theirs. So our pin #1 might be a hidden mickey and that references to pin pinpics 88888 or whatever. Oil filter companies and air filter companies do that all the time and then places like Autozone make a decoder book. The one part number is the same as another but with a different prefix. So our's could even be w88888 for "wiki-88888" and there's is 88888 and it's still fine.
As I mentioned before, why? All I care about is the pin, if I'm trading on the new site, people can reference the pin on that site. There is absolutely no need to provide cross-reference to another site. Unless the creator of this new site really wants to hire a lawyer to go over all of this, I still recommend making no reference to PinPics at all, regardless of whether it's legal or not... Why even cause the problem?
I think groups would be easiest to just to hashtags. Then you can search for #carsland or #parisPTN or whatever the groups are. You can have a page for all the groups listed. You could search your collection, trades, wants similarly with #markheardjrO, #markheardjrW, #markheardjrT. For Owns, Wants, Trades. Then just search "#markheardjrO" and all my owns will show up. Only problem with Wiki's is if you let everyone edit them everyone can screw them up. But cached pages could be refreshed.
No, groups need to be groups. People have groups of 'pins I think are cool', '10 pins I need to get for my mom', etc, etc... That's the real appeal of groups, having custom lists of pins for all sorts of purposes.
We could do the hashtag thing for universal groups (like all Wreck-it-Ralph, etc), but doing groups allows someone to easily maintain the group without having to add hashtags to every pin they want in the group... It's just a lot easier.