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Pinterest Updates Its Terms Of Use

Derek Andersen 2012-03-24T08:43:18+00:00

Pinterest updated their blog and sent an email to their users a few hours ago to reflect an update to the terms of use. The biggest takeaway is a reflection of their growing pains and continued attempts to stay ahead of their explosive growth. With a 20-person team, everyone has been focused on scaling the service which to date has done so impressively. Up until a few weeks ago they didn't even have a single PR representative, or anyone in business development. But that's changed as they start to aggressively fill these functions and become a real company.

They're now publicly addressing the major backlash that the company has taken over the past few months for less than open terms of use. As Ben says in his latest blog post "When we first launched we used a standard set of Terms." After you take $40MM in funding you can afford for a team of $900 lawyers to draft some better ones. Read the full message below:


"Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on an update to our Terms. When we first launched Pinterest, we used a standard set of Terms.  We think that the updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy are easier to understand and better reflect the direction our company is headed in the future. We’d encourage you to read these changes in their entirety, but we thought there were a few changes worth noting:

Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for us to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.

We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.

Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These Terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.

Like everything at Pinterest, these updates are a work in progress that we will continue to improve upon. We’re working hard to make Pinterest the best place for you to find inspiration from people who share your interests. We’ve gotten a lot of help from our community as we’ve crafted these Terms.

Thanks!

Ben & the Pinterest Team

About the Author

Derek Andersen

For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. Bevy has raised $60M from Accel, Upfront Ventures, and others. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 20,000 events. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.