An architecture firm, Concept Engineering LLC, filed a lawsuit in a Delaware federal court against Pinterest, and alleged the image-sharing site violated its copyright.
According to the claim, Concept is a firm that markets and licenses its architectural works worldwide. As part of their marketing efforts, they operate a website featuring numerous images of their work.
They claim that Pinterest users have been "pinning" their images via URLs. This has resulted in Pinterest scraping the content from those pages, grabbing their images, and reuploading them to Pinterest's servers without permission.
Concept alleges that it has taken several steps to prevent the misuse of its content. This includes using a no-right-click script to prevent image saving and utilizing reCAPTCHA to verify that visitors are human. They further allege that they use a specific file naming structure and that those names are changed.
The plaintiff seeks unspecified damages and injunctions preventing further violations. Jonathan Bailey, "Architect Sues Pinterest Over Scraping" www.plagiarismtoday.com. (Jul. 09, 2025).
Commentary
Lawsuits over copyright violations are costly in terms of time, money, and resources.
There are times when a copyright holder has no choice but to engage in litigation to protect its intellectual property. In other cases, such as this one involving Pinterest, there are ways to severely, if not completely, restrict sharing sites from hosting your intellectual property, thus avoiding the need for costly litigation in the first instance.
In the case of Pinterest, the help center page discusses the "Pinterestbot", which is the software vehicle that "scrapes" images from a website and puts them on the Pinterest server. That page gives simple instructions for blocking the bot via a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt has been an industry standard for more than 30 years. While bad bots do not follow it, Pinterestbot does. As a result, with a few lines of code, Concept or a similarly-concerned intellectual property owner could have blocked Pinterest from accessing its server. Currently, their robots.txt file allows all user-agents and only restricts access to two directories.
There are other tools and approaches. Concept, in this case, could have blocked Pinterest's IP addresses, prevented direct access to their images, or used watermarks to prevent Pinterest from accessing their pages.
If that did not work, they could have also filed DMCA notices against Pinterest for the infringing images. They might have even been able to access Pinterest's Content Claiming Portal to automatically remove works in the future.
An intellectual property owner, such as an architectural firm, while protecting its rights, need not automatically file suit. Steps that are far less expensive and just as effective could be taken to address this issue.
