Pinterest and Copyright Infringement

Pinterest has a remarkable story.  They’ve grown faster than even they could have hoped and now have millions of users “pinning” their favorite things from the web onto the users’ boards.

Of course, some brands love the grassroots advertising this provides, and many content providers appreciate the exposure.  In many cases Pinterest and other social media sites are driving more traffic to sites than search engines.  That is all well and good until someone doesn’t want their content copied and pinned.

Enter Pinterest and its response to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  The DMCA can make ISPs and online publishers liable for copyright infringement by their users, unless they take certain actions to fall within the safe harbor provisions.  Pinterest does this and even blogged about it this week.

I think Pinterest’s strategy of providing code for a meta tag that will prevent pinning of content from a page having that tag (an opt-out) is a bit short sighted.  But what I really found interesting were the comments from the content providers.

Now excuse me while I go find a plugin for WordPress so this post can be pinned.