Pinterest continues to address copyright issues and adds Flickr attribution

Due to a great deal of whiny criticism about copyright issues, Pinterest has introduced a new attribution system with the help of sites like Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube.

Over the past few months, as interest in Pinterest has grown and grown and GROWN, many issues have been raised about whether users really have a right to pin anything they please. Some individuals and businesses raised valid points about their work being taken and used without attribution, whereas others were just jumping on the “Pinterest is bad” bandwagon and made us want to set the internet on fire.

In response to some of these concerns the popular pinning platform updated its terms of service, gave everyone a way to block ‘pinning’ on their website and has today launched a new way of attributing those who originally created content.

According to the Pinterest blog, the site has been working closely with communities like Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and Behance in order to make it easier to pin content and credit the right people in the process.

From now on you’ll find that any images on Flickr that have sharing enabled are now accompanied by a “Pin It” button and now when you add something to a board from the photo sharing platform, it’ll appear with a much more detailed attribution.

The Pinterest blog post states:

“Attribution appears below the pin’s description and provides a permanent link to the work, its author, and where they host their content. Because attribution cannot be edited, photographers can rest assured that pins and repins of their work will credit and link back to them.

“We think simple and automatic attribution is a step forward for the sharing of content online, so we went even further than adding attribution to pins directly from Flickr. We will also retrieve attribution data from Flickr if a photo is pinned from a website or blog embedding a Flickr image.”

However, it’s not just Flickr images that are getting this kind of easy and automatic attribution, but video content from YouTube and Vimeo will start to show more comprehensive details about the original creators too.

This is a big and important step for Pinterest and not only does it make attributing content as easy as pie, but it shows that the site is taking the great deal of criticism it’s been getting recently very seriously indeed.

[Via Pinterest]