(flickr.com/rasamalai/5949864741/)

As Betabeat reported Tuesday, Flickr is making major changes--and apparently getting serious about protecting user copyright is among them. Late Friday VentureBeat published an exclusive on Flickr's new move to combat copyright infringement by Pinterest, the wildly popular darling of digital image curators everywhere:

The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has just added Pinterest's newly introduced do-not-pin code to all 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.

Pinterest's "do-not-pin" code is the pin-board giant's effort toward combating what amounts to rampant copyright violations by site users, who can easily rip images from most sites with Pinterest's "Pin It" bookmarklet. If an image goes viral, a photographer's work can quickly be viewed by millions of Internet users--without author credit.

Flickr's efforts may ultimately be in vain. The Verge addressed Pinterest's growth versus its copyright problem earlier this week: "In the end, none of these copyright issues are likely to derail Pinterest's explosive growth — they may distract from it, and they may certainly lead to a lawsuit or two as the company learns what is and isn't acceptable usage of other people's content."