Growing Up

Monday, February 20, 2012

Growing Up

The last few months have been a whirlwind here at Pinterest. It’s hard to explain how it feels to go from a small group of people working on a virtually unknown website, to a slightly bigger team of people working on a service that millions of people use every day. It’s humbling, and exciting.

With all that growth, we’ve gotten more questions from reporters and Pinners. In the past, we’ve been pretty quiet, but we want to get better about answering questions openly with people who are interested in Pinterest. We decided to start today by talking about copyright.

As a company, 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. We have a form for reporting claims of copyright violations on our site here. Every pin has a flag to make reporting easier. We also know that copyright is a complicated and nuanced issue and we have knowledgeable people who are providing lots of guidance.

Most publishers we speak with are excited about Pinterest. We’ve heard that Pinterest drives a lot of traffic to their websites. This has prompted many groups to add Pin It buttons to their websites. We’ve seen Pin It buttons on sites across the web, including some of our favorite retailers, marketplaces, museums, publications, and blogs.

At the same time, we understand and respect that sometimes site owners do not want any of their material pinned. For these folks, we provide a snippet of code that can be added to any website. You can find it in our help section.

Pinterest plays different roles for different people. People use Pinterest as a creative outlet, a place to connect with friends in new ways, a tool to plan important personal projects, and of course, a source of inspiration and discovery. We hope that like many technology services we’ve come to love on the internet - from blogs to YouTube to Facebook - we can help figure out good approaches to complex issues, and build a service that is valuable to lots of people all over the world.

- Ben