Pinterest Gives Copyright Credit to Etsy, Kickstarter, SoundCloud

After Pinterest‘s trove of copyrighted content became the subject of a legal debate, the popular social site made efforts to automatically add citations to content from specific sources. On Wednesday, it announced that it had expanded this practice to five new sites.

Since May, the feature had added citations to any content Pinned from Flickr, YouTube, Behance or Vimeo. Now content Pinned from photography community 500px, Etsy, Kickstarter, Slideshare and SoundCloud will enjoy the same automatic citations — which can’t be edited.

Although Pinterest’s Terms of Use prohibit its members from posting copyrighted material without permission, it doesn’t take more than a quick look at the site to notice that most of its content violates these terms.

Some have suggested that the large amount of copyrighted, unattributed content that has been copied to Pinterest’s servers creates a legal problem for the site.

Pinterest may be shielded from responsibility for what its users upload, but knowingly facilitating copyright infringement, according to the Wall Street Journal, could result in a Napster-like lawsuit.

“It sure sounds like copying people’s photographs without authorization would be copyright infringement,” wrote photographer Sean Locke in February. “Yet, Pinterest seems to be encouraging people to scour the web, pinning (copying to their servers) artwork created by others.”

The same month, Pinterest offered content creators an opt-out option that prevents their content from being Pinned. It also added a 500-character limit to descriptions in order to prevent users from posting entire articles and blog posts.

Pinterest’s attribution option is a more cooperative approach to protecting content creators, and sites such as Flickr — among the first to install the opt-out code — have embraced it.

But attribution isn’t instant permission to use copyrighted content. Would you like to see Pinterest go further in its efforts to protect content creators? Or are you happy with the solutions they’ve created?