Flickr, Behance, Vimeo and YouTube Add New Pinterest Attribution Tool

One thing Pinterest hasn’t necessarily done well is link the content its users “pin” with the people who originally created it. That has angered copyright holders and dampened the service’s potential to be a driver of traffic to other sites.

So today Pinterest announced it has signed four content hosting sites to use a new attribution tool: Flickr, Behance, Vimeo and YouTube.

The tool was developed in conjunction with Flickr, which is interesting because the photo-hosting site had previously implemented code provided by Pinterest in order to block pinning of copyrighted images. This is a separate project, said a spokeswoman for Pinterest.

Now, content for which the creator has enabled sharing on these four sites will include a “Pin it” button — on Flickr this is in a menu alongside Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr and WordPress. Once pinned, an attribution statement will be displayed that automatically includes a permanent link and can’t be edited as it’s repinned by other Pinterest users.

Here’s what it looks like: