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Court Finds "Pinning" On the Internet To Be Fair Use (docketalarm.com)
speedplane writes: Pinterest has always aggressively defended their trademarks, but in 2013, they launched a trademark lawsuit against Pintrips, a travel planning startup that allows users to "pin" and share information about flights. Yesterday, however, a federal court issued a major ruling against Pinterest finding that "pinning" is a feature, not a trademark, and therefore is fair use. This seems to bode well for the many other "pinning" sites on the internet.
It is a trademark case, not a patent case. They wouldn't have complained if they had used another word to describe it. By the way, fair use relates to copyright, so the court almost certainly didn't rule it was fair use, they probably ruled that "pinning" is a generic word.
Both trademark and copyright have fair use doctrines, though I agree with you that I believe Subby meant the copyright one, in error. At the least, it's somewhat misleading because it implies that the court ruled that putting a snippet of something online was fair use from copyright infringement, which wasn't an issue.
In trademark, fair use is what allows us to say "Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy, noted anti-vax denier" - we're using Playboy's trademarks, but only to name the source and in a minimal way.
Here, this was really about whether "pinning" is a merely descriptive term for providing links and snippets. And yeah, it goes back to scrapbooking and certainly is just a descriptive term.