Pinterest Terms of Service Changes Announced
Pinterest has been under fire for a while for their original Terms of Service, which stated, among other things, that by pinning content to your Pinterest boards you were agreeing to let them use that content in many ways, including selling it. There has been a lot of uproar, mostly by photographers and artists whose content is being pinned without their consent, who are worried their creations would be able to be used by Pinterest commercially without compensation to them. Pinterest has finally responded to these concerns, and they sent out this email this morning, explaining that the original TOS was a standard set of terms, and selling user content was never their intention.
“Updated Terms of Service
Over the last few weeks, 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.
We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.
Like everything at Pinterest, these updates are a work in progress that we will continue to improve upon. We’re working hard to make Pinterest the best place for you to find inspiration from people who share your interest. We’ve gotten a lot of help from our community as we’ve crafted these Terms.
Thanks!
Ben & the Pinterest Team”
The terms still do state that users are legally responsible for any copyright issues arising from the things they choose to pin, and that Pinterest cannot be held liable. They also have updated their Acceptable Use Policy and their Privacy Policy, so people can relax now and not worry so much about what might happen to their content if it gets pinned to Pinterest boards. Of course, there are still concerns for artists with their content getting pinned, with the possibility that improperly pinned items do not always lead back to the original source, but that is an issue that needs to be addressed by educating pinners, and content curators web-wide actually, in the proper way to pin/share content they find without losing the link to the original source.
Amazon Prime Now Includes Discovery Network Shows
Amazon Prime announced today that they have added 3000 more titles to their streaming Amazon Prime free library, They made a deal with Discovery Network to bring shows from Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and Science to Amazon Prime’s streaming library.
Some of the shows available will include “Deadliest Catch,Mythbusters, Man vs. Wild, Dirty Jobs, Gold Rush: Alaska, andShark Week, TLC series like Say Yes to the Dress and Cake Boss, as well as content like How It’s Made from Science, and The Jeff Corwin Experience from Animal Planet.” Yes, LA InK is included, too.
