Pinterest’s Crawlers Exploit Copyrighted Images, Suit Says (1)

Pinterest Inc. uses crawlers, bots, and humans to copy and exploit images of homes and floorplans, an Estonian architecture firm alleged in a federal copyright lawsuit.

Concept Engineering LLC alleged in its July 3 complaint that Pinterest profited by downloading the firm’s images to its own servers, displaying the copies, and using them in search engine optimization campaigns. Concept, which operates as ConceptHome and does most of its business in the US, also accused Pinterest of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing information used to indicate its copyright ownership of the images.

The complaint, filed in the US ...