Flickr disables Pinterest pins on copyrighted images (exclusive)

As the third most popular source of content on digital pin-board site Pinterest, Flickr and its photographers are subject to frequent acts of copyright infringement. But a site-wide update to Flickr promises to better protect members and their copyrighted works.

The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has just added Pinterest’s newly introduced do-not-pin code to Flickr pages with copyrighted or protected images.

“Flickr has implemented the tag and it appears on all non-public/non-safe pages, as well as when a member has disabled sharing of their Flickr content,” a Flickr representative confirmed to VentureBeat Friday. “This means only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest.”

Pinterest, as a refresher, is the digital pin-board site that encourages members to “pin,” via bookmarklet, the products, recipes, clothes, photos, and other items they love to collections called boards. The private beta site has grown into one of the most-trafficked social networks online.

The site has also given birth to the most inherently viral variant of the status update yet. This new breed of update, however, often promotes piracy as pins including copyrighted works spread from person to person.

To protect itself from copyright lawsuits, and appease disgruntled photographers and publishers, the young social media company introduced a snippet of code Monday that website owners can now add to their sites to prevent unwanted pinning. If a person on Pinterest attempts to share something from a site with that code in place, she will see a message that reads: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

Flickr can’t prevent all acts of photo piracy just by enabling the code — determined sharers will just work around the inconvenience and manually download and post images — but the act signals the site is proactively looking out for its photographers.