Pinterest, the online pinboard that lets users organize and share photos of the things they love, revised their terms of service after consulting with their members.  Here are some of the few changes worth mentioning:

Their original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right to sell your content. But, Pinterest says, selling content was never their intention, and removed it from their Terms all together.

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.

The updated terms of service will take effect on April 6, 2012.  But the updated TOS did not satisfy the photographer community’s copyright infringement concerns.

Change is not enough

In February, Pinterest added a simple snippet of code, located in the updated help section of the site, to help them stop unwanted sharing of copyrighted materials.  The code prevents people from Pinterest from getting content on websites using the said code.

“We care about respecting the rights of copyright holders. We work hard to follow the DMCA procedure for acting quickly when we receive notices of claimed copyright infringement,” co-founder Ben Silbermann wrote in a blog post. “We understand and respect that sometimes site owners do not want any of their material pinned.”

Kirsten Kowalski, lawyer and previous Pinterest user, deleted her boards on Pinterest after learning that Pinterest’s terms of service could leave her vulnerable to copyright litigation.

Section 1b of their new Terms of Service is probably the most scrutinized section:

“Subject to any applicable account settings you select, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, display, reproduce, re-pin, modify (e.g., re-format), re-arrange, and distribute your User Content on Pinterest for the purposes of operating and providing the Service(s) to you and to our other Users. Nothing in these Terms shall restrict Pinterest’s rights under separate licenses to User Content. Please remember that the Pinterest Service is a public platform, and that other Users may search for, see, use, and/or re-pin any User Content that you make publicly available through the Service.”

Simply put, if you “pin” anything on their site, and someone eventually buys Pinterest including everything in it, Pinterest won’t pay you.

On the brighter side…

Though photographers aren’t happy with Pinterest and copyright infringers, others are still using it to reach out to people.

Israeli agency Smoyz targeted 50 “influential” Pinterest users, studied their Pinterest boards, and then made handcrafted gifts for those users based on the items they liked most for Kotex’s “Woman’s Inspiration Day.”  The 50 gift boxes were sent to the 50 influential users, who pinned the images of the gift boxes on the site.  It resulted to a total of 694,853 impressions.

SLI Systems, a company that provides full-service, customized, on-demand solutions for site-search, navigation, merchandising, and user-generated SEO, announced they helped IR500 retailer Artbeads.com in improving the usability of their site and overall customer experience by integrating Pinterest with their Learning Search full-service site search on the beads and jewelry-making supplies retailer’s e-commerce site.

“Our shoppers have embraced Pinterest because it aligns with their love of craft and jewelry design — so it makes sense for us to guide them to products that have proven popular with other customers,” said Devin Kimura, CEO of Artbeads.com. “By bringing pinned products into SLI site search and allowing people to pin products they like, we can help shoppers explore our products more deeply and benefit from the recommendations of other site visitors.”