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SALT LAKE CITY — Fans of the social-networking website Pinterest may soon see a drop in content, as the photo-sharing site Flickr disabled sharing to Pinterest of copyrighted images.
The popularity of Pinterest has skyrocketed in recent months, receiving in one week in December nearly 40 times the visits it reached during a similar period six months prior. The site reached 12 million unique users in January, and as international audiences sign up in droves, it does not show signs of slowing down.
As the site has grown, though, so have concerns of illegal photo-sharing among photographers and other copyright holders who do not wish to see their content "pinned" without permission to other websites.
To address copyright concerns, Flickr announced last week it would disable the ability to pin — or share — copyrighted content to Pinterest. Intrepid pinners are still able to save a copyrighted image to their computers before uploading it to the site, but the move will drastically cut down on the amount of copyrighted images posted from Flickr and may set a precedent for other companies with copyright concerns.
Flickr is the third-largest source of content for users of Pinterest, behind only Google and Etsy. Flickr's decision in itself will not likely have a large impact on the new social network: only 2.5 percent of content posted is shared from Flickr. But the trend the decision may start could be dangerous to the much-loved social networking site, which is built around the idea of sharing online content that does not belong to the users themselves.
"Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love."
In the pin etiquette section of the website, Pinterest instructs users to "avoid self promotion," adding that "Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love."
The problem arises when the curation takes a potentially illegal turn. By signing its terms of use, Pinterest users agree not to violate copyright law, as well as release the site from any liability associated with copyright infringement.
Typically, though, users "re-pin" content that has already been shared from an external site — giving little thought to the potential legal issues that may arise.
And this is bad news for fans of the website: as users continue to post copyrighted content from websites aside from Flickr, these websites may decide to take the safe route and disable pinning to Pinterest, leaving a gaping hole in the image-aggregation site's source of content and undermining the original purpose of Pinterest, according to the site itself: to "organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web."
