Pinterest: Pin Or NoPin...

Pinterest

Our first and last post about Pinterest on how to use the web-pinboard for spreading your business awareness. The whole web is flooded with news on how Pinterest is a hit and all so quietly. They now are supposed to be generating more leads to third party sites than even Google for Facebook. The UI has been and we now have a online catalog that might just be a threat to quite a few businesses related to image collection and artwork.  But wait what about the copyrights issue we all are so fond of ?
There have been allegations on Pinterest to be allowing the misuse and breaking the copyright laws since it in no way prevents users from pinning images that may well be protected by copyright laws. Although the policy of Pinterest clearly states that the pinner (the person pinning on Pinterest) is sole responsible in either obtaining the original owner's (of the image) permission to pin or claim to own the image being pinned himself. Josh Davis of LLsocial.com claims that 99% of the pins on Pinterest are against the company's own Terms of Service. Although Pinterest may be doing enough to remind users to credit the original resource of the pin, but is that really enough? Seems Pinterest realizes it isn't. In an effort to keep itself away from all the allegations, Pinterest has released a piece of code that once embedded by the website owners, will prevent users from pinning any image from that website. Thus providing a way for you, the website owners, to protect your stuff. A start, we say! In addition to this Pinterest, currently following the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, will remove any image that someone claims is violating the copyright laws.
And this is not it, Pinterest let you put a 'Pin It' button on your website in an agreement way that the users of your site can publish your images on Pinterest. And, yes there is more, Pinterest is thinking of limiting the 500-characters pin caption limitation in order to stop people from stealing the different posts around the sites.
As for the code that Pinterest provided, website owners can use the below meta to stop its users from pinning anything and everything from their site:

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

This meta could be used as is and when a user will try to pin any content from that site there will be a pop up to ensure the message is delivered effectively: "This site doesn't allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting"

WordPress users can now use the nopin plugin, developed by Shawn Hooper, which actually implements the above functionality as detailed for the meta.

Flickr already seems to have implemented the functionality in an effort to prevent the copyright images of its users. 

Website owners (especially small business owners) will have a tough time deciding on the approach to take. Its important to protect your content and is equally important to consider the traffic the online web board seems to be generating. Pinterest however will have a few more things to work on. Your thoughts?