Pinterest this week provided the option for website owners to opt out of having their content directly "pinned" on the service in order to avoid copyright disputes.
Website owners can add a snippet of code that will disable the Pinterest "Pin it" button found near the Facebook "Like" and Twitter "tweet" buttons.
In a Monday blog post, Ben Silbermann, Pinterest co-founder, said "we care about respecting the rights of copyright holders," and insisted that the company works hard "to follow the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] DMCA procedure for acting quickly when we receive notices of claimed copyright infringement."
Every item that has been pinned on Pinterest, for example, includes a flag that allows users to easily report copyright violations. Under the DMCA, sites that host content are not responsible for copyright infringement if they take swift action to remove the offending content when it is reported.
Silbermann said that most publishers "are excited" about Pinterest and report that the service "drives a lot of traffic to their websites." As a result, the number of sites using the "Pin it" button has grown in recent months, including Oprah.com.
But "we also know that copyright is a complicated and nuanced issue and we have knowledgable people who are providing lots of guidance," Silbermann continued.
As PCMag said in its review, the idea behind Pinterest is to create pinboards in different categories onto which you can "pin" online images. As a result, "your virtual pasteboards become little collections of visually stunning images, with notes if you attach them and links back to the original source from whence the images came." As is the case with the Internet, however, sometimes those source links aren't the most reliable and could be cause for concern if the real owner of the image is not getting paid for its use.
"We hope that like many technology services we've come to love on the Internet - from blogs to YouTube to Facebook - we can help figure out good approaches to complex issues, and build a service that provides that is valuable to lots of people all over the world," Silbermann wrote.
Pinterest, meanwhile, has been around since 2008, but only recently started to take off. Pinterest last month hit 11.7 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S., crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other independent American site, according to recent data from comScore. Approximately 97 percent of those users, meanwhile, are female, according to AppData.
There was some controversy recently, however, over whether Pinterest was modifying pins without informing users in order to make more money.
For more, see PCMag's full review of Pinterest and the slideshow above. Also check out How Do People Use Pinterest?