Flickr Disables Pinterest Pinning for Copyrighted Photos

One of the new darlings of the Internet world is Pinterest, a photo-sharing social network that has exploded in the past year to become one of the world’s most popular websites. In recent days, however, there has been concern over the fact that copyrighted images can be so easily reproduced and reused on Pinterest without the owner’s permission. A week ago Pinterest launched a special “nopin” HTML meta tag that lets website owners prevent “pinning” on their sites, and last Friday Flickr became the first large photo service to implement the tag, preventing “pinning” for copyrighted and protected photos. Previously Flickr was the third most popular source of pins on Pinterest, so this update will likely have a big impact on both sites.

Update: The tag isn’t automatically added to all copyrighted photos. However, only “safe”, “public”, and “sharing enabled” photos are pinnable. (Thanks Jim!)