As the
noise continues to grow surrounding Pinterest and its potential legal headaches, the image-based social network has taken a small step toward placating website owners concerned with potential copyright violations.
As LL Social pointed out yesterday, Pinterest is supporting a “nopin” meta tag that will prevent users from pinning images directly from the site where the code is installed. The meta tag can be found at the bottom of Pinterest’s Help page, under a heading that says “What if I don’t want images from my site to be pinned?” It’s a simple piece of code:
meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin”
What The Tag Prevents (And What It Doesn’t)
When the tag is installed and a Pinterest user tries to pin an image from the site where it’s installed, a popup message appears telling the user that the site doesn’t allow its images to be pinned. I installed the meta tag on my Small Business Search Marketing blog and, when I tried to pin an image from one of my articles, this pop-up appeared:
Likewise, if I go to Pinterest.com and use the “Add” option, the meta tag will block pinning if I provide a URL from my domain. In that case, the message on Pinterest.com looks like this:
But the meta tag doesn’t completely prevent a site’s images from showing up on Pinterest. It doesn’t stop the user from downloading the image and then pinning it directly via upload; it only prevents pinning when the URL of the site with the meta tag is involved.
So, as I said, it’s a small step. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann told LL Social that more will be done in the future related to copyright concerns.
On an semi-related note, the LL Social article also mentions that Pinterest is now limiting users to 500 characters in the Description field for their pins. In some cases, this will prevent users from putting so much text with their pins that viewers don’t need to click through to visit the site where the image is hosted.
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