This is almost a sad day for the photo community. VCG has been suing Chinese startups and companies for licensing rights for a while [1], many of the licensed photographs appear in "free" or "CC0" websites. A year ago, we received a request of paying a 50k RMB penalty for a set of images downloaded from free CC0 websites as well as a set of images previously appeared in PetaPixel which then quoted from 500px in 2014 (this was before VCG's investment in 500px) - however VCG claims they have copyrights on them. The way to waive this penalty is to buy VCG bulk licenses or sign agreements with VCG to purchase their products (if you buy stuff from us, we won't charge you from the previous infringement issues!). When asked about why these photos show up in full resolution in free websites in the first place, they didn't provide a clear answer. One reason is that it is difficult to shutdown "pirated" and free image hosting sites created under individuals. For all these penalty or payments collected, VCG almost never repay the contributor or photographer. But I guess neither does their counterparts in the U.S. (this is a much larger issue that I won't expand here).
So if company A used 500px's image in 2014 before VCG's investment, and company B quoted company A's article, and you re-tweet or re-blogged company B's article, VCG (who now has copyrights in China for 500px images) might go after you to collect penalty but never contact A nor B.
Advise to startups : to make sure you don't infringe any copyrights, do a reverse search on VCG's database (especially you have market in China) as well as Getty's/shutter stock's database and never trust unsplash-ish websites (they also have no model releases that will get you in trouble). These stuff could bite you back in years if you have a photo floating somewhere in your public Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account.
Now that VCG has acquired 100% of 500px, what would (or could) happen is they will crawl anyone who has referenced 500px photos in China and start to threaten to sue in exchange for opportunity to gain more subscribers for their media library. Last year a couple of social media accounts on Wechat was forced to shutdown by this [2]. VCG quotes different penalty for different images, and it is usually 1000 RMB per image.
"Public domain" image stocks absolutely don't guarantee or even check that the images they host have proper licensing, indeed. I've seen some images that had Creative Commons Attribution licenses posted on these without any attribution, "relicensed" as CC0. So... they did nothing wrong according to copyright laws?
A photographer could accidentally upload or AT SOME POINT labelled his/her photos in the free domain, but ALSO upload with a license to a paid photo stock site. This is usually the root cause of most issues. Another possible reason is the photographer's harddrive got hacked, camera stolen etc, and the photos in full resolution was uploaded maliciously to free CC0 websites. Both scenarios are hard to trace and hard to attribute when an infringement happens, because it involves too many party to do diligence and collect evidences. Most likely the party that uses the photo will have to pay.
Canon and Nikon still provides no on system encryption although photographers have been asked for it for years, so basically if someone stole your camera, they also owns the copyright of photos from those RAW files.
That's true, never ever use photos of people from free stock websites/creative commons photo dumps. Paid photostocks require photographers to submit scans of signed model release forms. This is unfortunate for tiny/unprofitable websites, but — really — a few dozens of dollars for a stock photo with a guarantee of model release and a license is absolutely worth it.
In 2015, I was lucky enough to be sued by them for infringement of pictures. Our website is APP recommendation website, and we grab data from Appstore. One of the APP's cover pictures uses infringing pictures. If APP is A and Appstore is B, our unlucky C has also become a defendant. Although we have helped by a professional lawyer team of Baidu, we finally lost money, which seems to be 2000 yuan one picture.
I'm sorry about your troubles, but you probably didn't even have permission from the authors of screenshots to publish them on your website (again, according to current unfortunate copyright laws), so you might as well consider yourself lucky because you weren't sued by the authors of the software. Yes, screenshots of software are copyrighted, yuck. (That's why Wikipedia doesn't have full-size screenshots of proprietary software, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microsoft_Word_on_Windows...)
500px is a decent place to share photos and see other people's photos, but it is plagued by a total absence of non-photographer audience.
It's photogs looking at other photogs' work, vs. Facebook / Instagram that actually have an audience outside of the creators themselves. Let's say you shoot fashion. On Instagram you have models, MUAs, stylists, studios, agencies, brands and all of their non-creatives friends. On 500px, nothing, just photographers. It's somewhat akin to writing music that only other musicians will hear.
Oh and lots and lots of bots saying the same comment on every post.
Not really surprised they've been slowly slipping out of relevance. There's no particularly great reason to be on that specific platform.
>500px is a decent place to share photos and see other people's photos, but it is plagued by a total absence of non-photographer audience.
Isn't that the whole reason for them to exist in the first place? I think the problem here is the expectation (maybe internally at 500px as well) that every site has to hockey-stick its way to enormous success. A social-enabled portfolio site for photographers sounds like a very sensible idea to me.
Sure, but then you're just another one of those sites, and there are plenty of them already. Not clear how 500x stands out compared to the rest of them.
For me, it's not surprising that they got acquired. Ever since the co-founders left/got ousted, the reviews of the leadership/management have been pretty dismal. And most of my professional photographer friends usually just use Instagram to market themselves or still use Flickr for showcasing super high res versions.
A shame, I was hoping it'd be successful and benefit Toronto's startup scene.
I mostly envision 500px as a B2B platform. That is, showing your peers your chops. You don't see too many wannabes there. The exception to B2B being the elite level shooters who do workshops, etc.
On Instagram, everyone with an index finger and an iphone is a photographer. It's a large audience and images get views / likes, does that make it a good marketing fit?
I haven't heard Flickr mentiined in too long. Shame really. It was Instagram before Instagram existed. Kinda.
Only had 20 photos on there. I have no desire to leave them in the hands of a Chinese-owned company.
There's no built-in way to batch-export your photos, if you don't have a backup. You can visit this link https://500px.com/settings/store and if you click the middle column of images, they should automatically download one at a time at a high resolution (3000px+ w/h). If the images are smaller than that, you have to click into each one and use the dev tools to focus on the image and find the link. Stupid and uselessly, they disabled right-click.
Make sure you do all of this in a non-Chrome browser. In Chrome the images are rendered as webp and there isn't a super easy non-techie way to convert webp to anything else. If you use Firefox for example, its easy to right-click on the image from the link in the dev tools and save as a jpeg.
I'm curious to see a comparison of photo sharing sites, their intended audiences, and relative strengths and weaknesses, from the people who actually use them. For example, I really like Google Photos for sharing my own photos with family and friends, but it doesn't seem to have got into the pro market much (why?)
Elite creators usually don't like to hang out creatively where the general masses do. It's true in art broadly, it's true in music, it's true in photography. New scenes - think grunge or punk rock - don't usually happen where the old scene is. There's a certain element of snobbery ('this is our thing') and cultural rebellion inherent in that, and I don't mean that in a harsh way, it's just the way it has tended to be historically. Separation from the mundane status quo.
If you're one of the 100 greatest living photographers, the odds are you're not overly interested in hanging out where average Joe is posting and sharing 927 pictures of the family vacation to Disneyland. People like communities filled with people at least somewhat like themselves. Even the cool factor inevitably plays into it (mass market sites inherently lose that), no matter how much a person may resist that lure. Once upon a time, Yelp and Flickr were small, tight-knit, snobbish communities that the masses had never heard of.
If a site goes fully mainstream, it'll start to bleed off its elite creators (assuming there are alternatives). They'll seek out a new scene, they'll try to get away from the mundane that inevitably sets in, and the dilution of the qualities of the community that initially attracted them.
I did have an account there. I should probably find my login and delete my images. It was fun, but in the age of image sharing everywhere, I didn't use it much (I uploaded 5 images). I had more friends on flickr and later instagram, so thats where I ended up.
With Flickr->Yahoo->Verizon and instagram->Facebook, there seems like a lot of consolidation in this space.
> VCG is among the top image licensing companies in the world, the go-to choice for creative and media professionals in China, and an award-winning leader in copyright protection.
Nothing in China related to companies scream "choice"
Companies like to tout the largest possible acquisition price, so usually $17mm would be the total acquisition cost. Which is a down round severe enough that the last round's investor liquidation preference would mop up all of the money.
Just a guess, I don't know the details of this deal.
So if company A used 500px's image in 2014 before VCG's investment, and company B quoted company A's article, and you re-tweet or re-blogged company B's article, VCG (who now has copyrights in China for 500px images) might go after you to collect penalty but never contact A nor B.
Advise to startups : to make sure you don't infringe any copyrights, do a reverse search on VCG's database (especially you have market in China) as well as Getty's/shutter stock's database and never trust unsplash-ish websites (they also have no model releases that will get you in trouble). These stuff could bite you back in years if you have a photo floating somewhere in your public Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account.
Now that VCG has acquired 100% of 500px, what would (or could) happen is they will crawl anyone who has referenced 500px photos in China and start to threaten to sue in exchange for opportunity to gain more subscribers for their media library. Last year a couple of social media accounts on Wechat was forced to shutdown by this [2]. VCG quotes different penalty for different images, and it is usually 1000 RMB per image.
[1] https://xueqiu.com/8818667120/74351790
[2] https://www.zhihu.com/question/48400883