Pinterest Updates Terms of Service

Posted by Gwen on March 24, 2012 in Pinterest | 0 comments

For those of you who don’t know what Pinterest is, it’s the online equivalent of a bulletin board–a cool way to create an online collage (boards) of your favorite travel destinations, design ideas, recipes. The possibilities are endless.

But the topic garnering the most attention — and criticism — for the hot new social sharing site has been their existing Terms of Service, which in a word, sucks. Basically it states in no uncertain terms that whatever you “pin” to their website belongs to them. Forever.

Under the current terms:

“By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.”

When pinboard site users read the fine print and discovered that the Terms of Service allowed Pinterest to “sell”your images, there was a lot of unhappy pinners.

Well, according to an announcement on Pinterest’s blog yesterday, Pinterest has updated their Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy–effective April 6.

The “sell” word is gone and Pinterest says “Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated terms.”

Under the new terms of service Pinterest is clear in noting that it will use your content merely “for the purposes of operating and providing the Service(s) to you and to other Users.”

Oh, and the rights are no longer “irrevocable” and “perpetual.” Whew.

New terms (effective April 6 2012)

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. (Section 1b)

To learn more–and read the new Terms of Service, hop over to the Pinterest blog.

Oh, and if you ARE a Pinterest fan, feel free to

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Gwen

Founder at Endurance Marketing

Gwen has more than a decade of digital marketing and communication experience. She has helped brands leverage social media tools and strategies to improve brand visibility, build relationships and fuel business growth.