Over the last few weeks, digital’s new little darling has taken a good-old fashion media beating in terms of, well…their terms of service and privacy policy. And like all good start-ups, they are feeling the growing pains of increased popularity.
In a blog post and via email, the Pinterest team announced the following changes in their terms, effective April 6, 2012.
“We’ve been working on an update to our Terms. When we first launched Pinterest, we used a standard set of Terms. We think that the updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy are easier to understand and better reflect the direction our company is headed in the future. We’d encourage you to read these changes in their entirety, but we thought there were a few changes worth noting.
- Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.
- We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.
- We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.
- Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.”
What is most intriguing is the line “Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.”
While at SXSW, President and CEO of stock photo agency, Getty Images, Jonathan Klein spoke about photo sharing on the Internet.
“We’re comfortable with people using our images to build traffic. The point in time when they have a business model, they have to have some sort of license.”
What does this mean? As soon as Pinterest starts running ads and making money on its own, agencies like Getty and other intellectual property owners have the right to ask for royalties. If they don’t, they would need to delete the pinboards.
Clearly, Pinterest is aware of the compounding issues, hence the aforementioned changes in the terms of use. Time will tell what the power-house referral engine will do, but with $37.5 million dollars in funding and their ever increasing popularity, they better do it soon.
Ben Silbermann also noted, a Pinterest API is in development as well, so more Pinterest-related applications should be on their way soon. With the API, developers will be able to build applications using or based-off of Pinterest.
We’re curious, do you plan to continue using your Pinterest boards as is, or will you start to create your own unique images to accompany your content?
Tags: How To: Social, Pinterest, Social Thought Leadership