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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charge money, though. 500px informed The Verge that there weren't many people using CC images, many of which had outdated licenses.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.
I understand that licenses come in various versions, but really, calling a license "outdated" seems to me to be a loaded term.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reaction to receiving an email requesting that he issues a GPLv3 license for the kernel "because the old license is outdated and invalid".)