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Pinterest hires Google's former top lawyer


Fast-rising social network Pinterest has hired former Google deputy general counsel Michael Yang to be its legal head, a business site reported over the weekend.
 
Yang, who left Google over the weekend, is expected to keep watch over the image-sharing site's copyright issues, according to a report on Business Insider.
 
The report quoted a PR representative for Pinterest as confirming Yang's hiring.
 
One of the most serious legal challenges facing Pinterest now is that a large portion of the content it hosts may be copyrighted.
 
Such content may have been posted without the consent or even knowlege of the copyright owners.
 
Business Insider cited the case of a lawyer who used Pinterest deleted her account for fear of being sued.
 
Yet, Pinterest remains a hot social media property, registering major growth in recent months.
 
Business Insider said investors just gave it another $50 million at a $1.5-billion valuation, and employees are leaving other Silicon Valley firms to join it.
 
On the other hand, Yang is familiar with controversy - in 2008, he handled controversy over an awkward section in the terms of service of Google's Chrome browser.
 
The Business Insider report said the original terms of Chrome indicated that anything users wrote in Chrome, Google owned.
 
In 2010, Yang also fixed a potential PR nightmare for Google when its now-defunct product Buzz published the names of the people its users frequently emailed.
 
He went out to explain how the company would fix the problem, Business Insider said.
 
This year, Google sent Yang to Washington D.C. to explain a new privacy policy to congress people looking for headlines.
 
A separate article on CNET noted Pinterest is the current site to watch among the digerati.
 
By the end of last year, it had become one of the Top 10 social-media sites, and at the beginning of 2012, it saw its unique visits jump an impressive 52 percent, from January to February alone, to a total of 17.7 million (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57450003-93/pinterest-hires-ex-google-legal-eagle-report-says/).
 
It also cited speculation that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg might be looking to compete by buying a rival site, The Fancy. — TJD, GMA News
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