500px Closes Its Photo Marketplace (engadget.com)

Photo platform 500px has decided to close its in-house Marketplace that lets users buy and sell photos. According to Engadget, the service "will now rely on moving photos through Getty Images in most of the world as well as VCG (which acquired 500px in February) in China." From the report: Users no longer have the option to upload photos under a Creative Commons license that would let buyers remix photos or otherwise reuse them. There's no way to migrate, download or even search for these images. You won't have another CC-style license in its place, either. At best, you'll have a royalty-free 500px License that distributes pictures through either Getty or VCG. This isn't strictly a ploy to make photographers charge money, though. 500px informed The Verge that there weren't many people using CC images, many of which had outdated licenses. There were bugs searching for them, too.

Comments

Re:So basically what this means is....

[jrumney]

They are no longer a startup aiming for eyeballs to increase their "valuation". They were bought, and now they need to figure out how to turn a profit.

"Outdated" Licenses?

[Mathinker]

I understand that licenses come in various versions, but really, calling a license "outdated" seems to me to be a loaded term. Unless some kind of legislative change somehow made offering the old licenses illegal, or changed the interpretation of their terms, they are still perfectly as valid as they were when they were adopted.

It's just PR-speak to sugarcoat/whitewash a management decision. What bugs me more than usual here, though, is the collateral damage from the mis-education of the public, who in general already don't understand IP-related stuff. (Imagining Linus Torvalds' reaction to receiving an email requesting that he issues a GPLv3 license for the kernel "because the old license is outdated and invalid".)

Sellout to Getty hmm?

[nitehawk214]

I am concerned that I am going to get extortion letters from Getty for my own images that I have on 500px. Not that I am a professional photographer or that anyone would actually pay for my photos. But Getty doesn't seem to give a shit about stomping all over little people that it. The principal of not being able to do what I want with something I own is infuriating enough.

https://www.extortionletterinf...

If I simply delete them all, then there is no remaining evidence online that the pictures were ever mine, giving Getty the power to sell them at will.

At least I wasn't stupid enough to share my full resolution raws with 500px. Is having those at least defense in court that I am the actual owner of a given image?

Re:Sellout to Getty hmm?

[coofercat]

My information is second hand, but I'm told about 10 years ago that Getty spent a load of money buying up "all" of the photo libraries around the world and then renegotiating the contracts they had with photographers. Ultimately, it meant that photographers got paid a pittance for their images, and guess what... Getty did nicely out of the deal. It used to be that one good picture could pay for a week or two week's trip to wherever. Under Getty, you'd need several top-sellers to achieve the same sort of return.

In response, a few new libraries sprang up. They're naturally smaller than what Getty can deliver, but they're considerably more personalised to their customers, have some very dedicated and skilled photographers and pass on more of the sale price to the people doing the actual work. As a rule of thumb, you won't get as much accepted, you won't sell as much, but you'll get a decent return.

In short - Getty are 'monopolists' in photography, muscling the industry to their own ends. Be very careful of that before getting into bed with them in any way.