Thank you so very much!

Hi Auna – I put watermarks on my images using either Photoshop or Picnik (http://www.picnik.com). Picnik is apparently closing in April, but any similar online photo editor would likely do the trick. And Photoshop Elements is apparently cheaper than the full-fledged version, which is kind of expensive. Good luck!

If you’re unhappy about pinterest taking wide rights over your work that someone else has pinned, you need to ask pinterest to remove it, using the DMCA takedown request. Just having the pinner remove it does not cancel the rights pinterest have taken – those are ‘irrevocable’ except by asserting that the work was pinned without permission.

Might we hear from artists about the ACTUAL increase in traffic to their site and subsequent sales?
I’m somewhat sceptical as to the increases we’ve heard so much about as to date I’ve only heard from artists who had a lot of their pics pinned to the site but who’ve said they didn’t need the fingers on both hands to count the extra traffic to their websites!
So who’s getting the traffic for paintings?

I find the fact that they stopped using skimlinks pretty fast compelling evidence that not everything was as it should be.
There has certainly been quite a bit of comment as to the fact that Pinterest has been going after the income generation angle so early in its life. One of the aspects that the retail sector is most pleased with is the way in which it’s generating traffic for commercial products – it’s far outstripping the traffic generated by Google+, Youtube and LinkedIn combined according to this infographic (which fails to source its data) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/facts-about-pinterest-users_n_1312935.html
see this infographic for more about the impact on retail traffic http://mashable.com/2012/01/29/pinterest-retail-infographic/
and this article re traffic for lifestyle magazines
In terms of targeting the decorating market for women with money to spend it does indeed seem to be the perfect vehicle
What people need to be very aware of is that this site will be generating income from the content that members create as it matures. There will be adverts, there will be links to products, there will be links to suppliers – it won’t just be something that looks pretty.
What I’m interested to know is how it’s going to deal with the FTC aspect regarding affiliate links – which like the grittier aspects of copyright ownership seems to be another matter which Pinterest has yet to get to grips with

Beth, Here’s an article on CBS News that talks about it the swapping out links:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57373201-501465/pinterest-secretly-swaps-links-for-profit/
Here’s a snip of the article:
“The affiliate marketing blog GTO Management noticed that links were being changed without notice to members. Instead of going to a user’s link, Pinterest is swapping out the links to the benefit of its partner Skimlinks.
“I discovered that a pin that linked to one of our merchant clients was swapped out for a Skimlinks affiliate link,” Joel Garcia said in a blog post. Garcia repeated this experiment a few times with varied results.
According to social media blogger Josh Davis, Skimlinks automatically goes through a site and converts affiliate links, so that it will point to its own.”
But, perhaps I’m misunderstanding the article and it is saying that there wasn’t an affiliate link in the first place, that it just went to the merchant’s site, but SkimLinks inserted an affiliate link on Pinterest’s behalf.
Regarding the 2nd part of your comment, their terms do say they can sell the work (on their site) that is pinned. It’s a pretty broad statement:
“By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, *modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.”
They have the word “sell” in there .. . and “exploit.”
It sounds like you get a lot of traffic from it, which is great. I have found quite a bit of my work pinned on there–some with attribution, some not, and I get very little traffic to my website or blog from it. Part of that could be that Pinterest uses the full images–so people just repin what they see on there with no reason to go to the artist’s site.
Here’s another interesting article.
http://girlfriday.ca/blog/2012/02/on-sharing-and-pinterest-musings/

Thanks, Lilith – I think there are things you can do to protect your work if you don’t want someone stealing it, so I’m not advocating that every artist just throw up their hands and say “I’m helpless! Just take it!” But I really love to see artists embracing new tools and getting great benefit from them, while they’re taking steps to make sure people know where their work came from – like watermarks and text on pins!