Responding to questions about the legality of its content, social media site Pinterest is taking additional measures to protect copyrighted material posted online. As the company states on its blog, “We want to try to give credit where credit is due.”
Pinterest recently announced that it has added five more websites to its automatic attribution program, which automatically adds citations to the original source of the content. In May, attributions were added to any content “pinned” from Flickr, YouTube, Behance, or Vimeo. Now content from photography community 500px, Etsy, Kickstarter, Slideshare, and SoundCloud will also be subject to automatic attribution.
Attribution is gathered automatically from the content source, shows below the pin’s description, and cannot be changed by the Pinterest user, according to Pinterest. In addition, existing pins from 500px, Etsy, Kickstarter, Slideshare, and SoundCloud will also be automatically attributed.
These are not the first steps Pinterest has taken to address copyright concerns. As we previously discussed on this IP blog, Pinterest previously implemented policies that allow websites to “opt out.” Copyright holders that do not want their content featured on Pinterest can now block their content by adding a line of code to their website. Pinterest users that try to share images or other material from a blocked site will receive the following message: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”
Pinterest has shown that it is taking an active roll in addressing the copyright concerns of content owners. However, there is still a significant risk that it will face a copyright infringement lawsuit sometime down the road.
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