Earlier this week, the tech blogosphere raised a lot of concerns regarding the copyright theft the Pinterest was paving way to, besides its impressive growth over the last few months. Then to address the concerns, the fastest growing social pinboard site released a quick fix for the copyright infringements that can happen because of pinning the copyrighted images by its users. But, the quick fix added an overhead to content owners by compelling them to add a ‘nopin’ meta tag on the ‘head’ section of their webpages that has copyrighted images. It was like 10+ million users of Pinterest can enter your home any time and would explore the private things of yours until or unless you hanged a board with ‘nopin’ meta tag outside your home.
This is not a real fix, but I hope Pinterest was working on curating this problem by forming a separate team to monitor the copyright infringements that was made by its users in real-time, and need to solve them as soon as they happen either by code or human. Most of the copyright owners were not so happy with this ‘nopin’ tag, but Flickr did its job to protect the copyrighted and private images of its users by adding ‘nopin’ tag to the pages, it not wants to be pinned by Pinterest.
This was a big relief to a large number of Flickr users who has stored copyrighted contents in the photo sharing site, after all it needs to click a single bookmark button for Pinterest to rip all the images on a page and let its users pin on their boards. Then in a matter of minutes it has a chance of getting repinned by thousands of other users leading to a massive copyright theft. “You won’t feel the pain, until someone pinned your photo that took your weeks of hard work on a forest”, a Flickr user (who doesn’t wants to reveal his identity) told me after his copyrighted photo containing “beautiful views of a lake” was pinned and repinned all over the Pinterest. “It was very frustrating to see your own friends reppining your photo from other users board and they had no idea of who took this photo”, he added.
For those who struck here with the no idea of what Pinterest is, it’s a social network allowing its users to maintain a number of boards based on their interest in which they can pin the images from other websites. Pinterest offers its users a bookmark link which when added to their bookmark tool bar once, lets them to pin the images to their board from any website they are browsing just by clicking on the bookmark link.
