The large image-sharing site Pinterest, mostly popular among female Internet users, has hired former Google top lawyer Michael Yang to head its legal department and, most likely, defend the company on copyright issues, according to a new report.
Business Insider reported on Friday, June 8, that Pinterest has confirmed it has tapped Google's Michael Yang, who, according to the news outlet, left his position as deputy general counsel at the tech giant the same day. "Soon, he'll be Pinterest's head of legal, a PR rep for the company confirms," wrote the Business Insider.
Business Insider further notes that Yang handled damage control when people objected to Google's Buzz product, which published the names of the users it frequently emailed. Yang also managed a controversy over Google Chrome's terms of service, and traveled to Washington this year to discuss Google's new privacy policy.
Copyright Challenges
Pinterest is a wildly popular image-sharing site among Internet users. By the end of 2011, Pinterest had climbed to the Top 10 social media sites, and at the beginning of this year it experienced a whopping 52 percent increase in its unique visits, from January to February alone, reaching a total of 17.6 million unique visits. The company also raised $35.7 million from VCs such as Andreessen Horowitz. Some recent speculation, however, indicated that Facebook's entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg might be interested in competing with Pinterest by acquiring rival site The Fancy.
On the other hand, Pinterest's impressive surge has been rather shadowed by some copyright challenges threatening the popular site. Pinterest users often create "pinboards" of images that they have found interesting, and many times the images are copied from various other Web sites those users visit while they browse the Web. The problem arises when those images are copied from other sites onto Pinterest without considering legal ownership.
In an effort to address this issue, Pinterest has created a code snippet that Web sites can use so people would not "pin" their content to Pinterest, and the company is focusing on doing everything in its power to ensure that such copyright challenges do not threaten the site's well-being.
