
500px will no longer allow photographers to license their photos under CC - keyi
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/1/17521456/500px-marketplace-creative-commons-getty-images-visual-china-group-photography-open-access
======
whatshisface
> _500px says that it reached out to Creative Commons in May, and explained at
> the time that the reason for the shift was that they weren’t seeing a lot of
> activity with Creative Commons images, that they still had a number of bugs
> when it came to searching for such images, and they only had outdated
> licenses for photographers. In short, there’s not enough activity for 500px
> to justify continuing it._

What? That doesn't make any sense. Creative Commons is not some kind of
million page regulation that requires constant maintenance - it's just an
option in a dropdown, or even just a note in the description. There has to be
some hidden motivation behind disallowing it, although I can't imagine what
that motivation could be.

~~~
rbanffy
> I can't imagine what that motivation could be.

Last time I checked, their revenue came from members. If they plan to act as
middle-men, this move makes sense if they see CC as a no-profit scenario.

~~~
djsumdog
Yep. Same reason YouTube wanted to pull the Blender videos. Very popular
content that's freely licensed costs them money. Hosting isn't free. We need
more distributed platforms where everyone who views the content can help serve
it to their neighbours as well.

~~~
wmil
Stripe just cut off Bitchute, so distributed platforms are facing some clear
hostility from Silicon Valley insiders.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Decentralization is great for disrupting existing incumbents, and has the
added benefit of creating an opportunity for a company to re-centralize the
culture. GitHub is a great example of this, as are the many attempts to chip
away at email

~~~
TaylorAlexander
GitHub is a great example of decentralization? In what way? I view GitHub as a
centralized service.

~~~
cwyers
> has the added benefit of creating an opportunity for a company to re-
> centralize the culture

------
ipsum2
500px has grown increasingly developer and community hostile recently. They
abruptly shut down their API earlier this year:
[https://support.500px.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360002435653-API...](https://support.500px.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360002435653-API-)

If people need alternatives to 500px, Flickr allows CC-licensed photos, and
recently got sold to Smugmug. Hopefully they'll keep the licensing intact.

~~~
nvr219
I remember everyone leaving flickr for some reason yeeears ago (I don't
remember the reason)

As someone who is not a photographer, I only follow photographers on
Instagram. FWIW.

~~~
dingaling
Instagram is like a performance show; every shot a photographer posts there is
expected to have a wow-factor and generate Likes.

Flickr is much more relaxed; it's not perfect ( you can't exclude photos fron
the Photostream for example ) but there's less of an expectation of consistent
performance. I'm happy to upload 'warranty shots' to Flickr, unexciting but
interesting documentary photos.

~~~
WolfRazu
More importantly, Instagram downscales your photos to poop and bans zooming.

------
RobertRoberts
Getty is an awful company, I refuse to use any of their photos ever, ever
again. They have sued multiple businesses that I know of when those businesses
put photos _they PAID for_ on their sites and Getty threatened them.

Everyone needs to know about the "legal extortion" that Getty uses with their
stock photography.

[https://www.extortionletterinfo.com/](https://www.extortionletterinfo.com/)

This business with 500px stinks of a massive takeover of any sources that will
compete with Getty. Be warned, they smell like the Microsoft of the 90s.

------
AlphaWeaver
Props to the team at the Internet Archive led by Jason Scott who archived 3TB
of images in 48 hours after the decision was announced with zero notice. [0]

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1013464718923718658](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1013464718923718658)

------
dagenix
These types of business decisions always mystify me. It's certainly their
right to choose what content to host. And, I wouldn't expect them to host
content that isn't serving their business. But, making such a change with
basically no warning is a pretty clear sign that they will do so again. And,
who wants to deal with a company that will make such drastic changes,
basically overnight, if you have any other options.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “if you have any other options.”

This is always the key. What are you going to switch to? Shutterstock? Getty?
They all do crap like this unilaterally and with no regard for what
contributors or customers want. It’s a calculated business choice that the
people upset by the change won’t materially impact business as usual.
Unfortunate but omnipresent.

~~~
dagenix
All very true. I'd just naively assume that the risk of some very negative PR
isn't worth it when you can largely mitigate it by providing just a few weeks
notice. Clearly, they didn't see it this way.

------
brylie
Pexels is another place to upload CC photos:

[https://www.pexels.com/](https://www.pexels.com/)

The Internet Archive also allows you to upload photos, and has a slideshow
display for multiple photo collections

[https://archive.org](https://archive.org)

~~~
emeraldd
Another good one is:

[https://pixabay.com/](https://pixabay.com/)

I use both for reference photos when painting.

------
andreagrandi
My guess is that they are not even interested in taking new customers onboard.
Before knowing all of this I was interested in purchasing their most expensive
plan but I had a question, so I contacted them. I got an automatic reply
saying that they were going to reply in 10 days. Well... after 12 days they
hadn't replied yet. I contacted them again on Twitter and they just replied it
takes 14 days for non customers. But again, they never replied to my
questions, not even after 20 days. Not interested to buy anything anymore at
this point.

------
pinjasaur
[Unsplash]([https://unsplash.com/](https://unsplash.com/)) is a site that
offers photos licensed almost one-to-one with CC0. I'd strongly recommend
giving it a shot.

\- Unsplash license:
[https://unsplash.com/license](https://unsplash.com/license)

\- Compare with CC0: [https://medium.com/unsplash/the-unsplash-
license-f6fb7de5c95...](https://medium.com/unsplash/the-unsplash-
license-f6fb7de5c95a#083e)

~~~
Digital-Citizen
The Unsplash license contains the following:

"This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to
replicate a similar or competing service."

Therefore use "for commercial and noncommercial purposes" is quite restricted
to whatever Unsplash considers "a similar or competing service", a vague
definition that could change at any time. The medium.com article you pointed
to has a bad pointer[1] when it comes to explaining what this means. Unsplash
decides what that means ad hoc so you don't really know what your rights are.
If what comes under "photos published on Unsplash" could also be considered a
computer program, the above quoted clause would render such a program to be
nonfree software (see [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) for a definition of free
software).

CC0 has no clause comparable to the above quoted clause in the Unsplash
license. Also, CC0 is a more thorough abdication of copyright power in
copyright regimes where the public domain exists. Unlike the Unsplash license,
CC0 uses licensing under a lax, permissive license as a fallback, not a
primary mechanism for giving up one's copyright power in the work. This point
is not given its due in the medium.com article you pointed us to. Finally,
according to [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
list.html#CC0](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0) CC0 is a
non-copyleft free software license when applied to computer software.

[1] [https://community.unsplash.com/help-section/what-is-the-
unsp...](https://community.unsplash.com/help-section/what-is-the-unsplash-
license-and-where-can-i-find-it) didn't work when I tried it.

------
ChuckMcM
While I don't doubt that all of the reasons they give are strictly true, I
wonder if they dropped CC and other public licenses because to host such an
image still costs money but they don't get any revenue for it. So if the
percentage of images that are holding non-revenue generating licenses is too
high, their fixed costs cut too far into their revenue to sustain operations.

One could argue that the might work on being more efficient about their fixed
costs but this seems a simpler fix.

------
Rjevski
Just wondering, why can't you license your photos through whatever
service/license they want, _and_ mention in your profile that all pictures are
under Creative Commons and copying is authorised (plus mention a personal site
with all the pictures in full resolution there)? As the original copyright
holder you are allowed to grant this extra license in addition to whatever the
platform says.

~~~
kam
You could, but it won't help anyone find it. There used to be an option to
filter searches by license.

------
est
Photo hosting is not exactly rocket science, I think the community could
invent something a distributed community using like IPFS+ActivityPub.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
[https://pixelfed.org/](https://pixelfed.org/)

Not much yet but it's being worked on. Contribute?

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shmerl
Good incentive for photographers to ditch this service.

~~~
nnash
No way, this only affects remixers who can't be bothered to shoot their own
references.

~~~
jeena
Not true, I release all my photos under a CC license out of principle.

~~~
jaysonelliot
What is that principle?

I'm a fan of CC, and I see how it is valuable to people, but what is the core
principle involved with not being paid for your work?

Honest question. Creative Commons is a wonderful thing. I'm just wondering
what you mean by stating that you have a principled reason for releasing
everything under CC.

~~~
chrisseaton
> but what is the core principle involved with not being paid for your work?

I doubt their core principle is to not be paid for their work, and they never
said that it was - you've imagined that from a silly twist of what they've
written. They said their core principle was to licence as CC.

Do you think charity volunteers have a core principle to work for free? Of
course not - instead they have a core principle to contribute towards a cause
and they accept not being paid for it in order to achieve that.

I would imagine this person's core principle is the same - they want to
contribute their photographs for other people to use without licensing
problems and they accept not being paid for it.

------
TorKlingberg
I guess we're all going back to Flickr:
[https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/](https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/)

