Pinterest, the digital pin-board site that has taken the world by storm, has received a lot of flak recently due to the fact that users share copyrighted content without any permission or linking back to sources. To help combat that problem, Pinterest released a do-not-pin code that lets webmasters easily block their content from being pinned on Pinterest. As of today, Flickr has implemented it on its website to help prevent the usage of its copyright material on Pinterest.
In a statement to VentureBeat, Flickr confirmed: ” Flickr has implemented the tag and it appears on all non-public/non-safe pages, as well as when a member has disabled sharing of their Flickr content. This means only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest.” So now if you try to pin a protected image from Flickr, you get a message saying “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”
While this doesn’t stop people from manually downloading the images and then uploading them by themselves, it does show that Flickr cares enough about protecting the work of its users. How many of you have been the victim of your work being shared without credit on Pinterest?