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...)
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