Pinterest Users Blocked From Sharing Flickr Photos

Flickr has implemented a piece of code that prevents users of social network Pinterest from ‘pinning’ some of its photos.

The Yahoo-owned photo sharing site has made the move to protect the copyright of users who do not want their images to be shared on the site.

Do not pin

Pinterest allows its users to ‘pin’ or share images, products and other items they like to collections called boards, via a bookmarklet. However many copyright holders have objected to the site’s use of their content, prompting the company to release a piece of code that website owners can use  to stop their property from being shared.

Flickr, which is the third most popular source of content on Pinterest, has chosen to implement this ‘do not pin’ code.

“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,” a Flickr spokesperson told VentureBeat. “This means only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest.”

If a Pinterest user tries to share any other photo, they are greeted with a prompt that reads: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

Copyright concerns

“As a company, we care about respecting the rights of copyright holders,” Pinterest said in a blog post. “We work hard to follow the DMCA procedure for acting quickly when we receive notices of claimed copyright infringement. “

“Every pin has a flag to make reporting easier. We also know that copyright is a complicated and nuanced issue and we have knowledgeable people who are providing lots of guidance,” it continued. “We understand and respect that sometimes site owners do not want any of their material pinned. For these folks, we provide a snippet of code that can be added to any website.”

While this will most likely deter some users from sharing copyrighted material, determined users will still be able to manually download and post images to the social network.

This is not the first time that Pinterest has courted controversy. Last month, Google removed its official Android app was removed from the Android Market after it was revealed to be little more than a wrapper for the mobile website. However it is in better favour with Facebook, which has made it an official “social app” partner.

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