20 ms·

500px will no longer allow photographers to license their photos under CC

250 points by keyi 8y ago

dagenix 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > “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 8y ago
    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.
- deltateam 8y ago
  Choyna
whatshisface 8y ago
>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Commons images, that they still had a number of bugs when it came to searching for such images, and they only had outdated licenses for photographers.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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Stripe just cut off Bitchute, so distributed platforms are facing some clear hostility from Silicon Valley insiders.
      - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
        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 8y ago
        GitHub is a great example of decentralization? In what way? I view GitHub as a centralized service.
        cwyers 8y ago
        > has the added benefit of creating an opportunity for a company to re-centralize the culture
      - 8y ago
shmerl 8y ago
Good incentive for photographers to ditch this service.
- nnash 8y ago
  No way, this only affects remixers who can't be bothered to shoot their own references.
  - jeena 8y ago
    Not true, I release all my photos under a CC license out of principle.
    - jaysonelliot 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        > 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.
      - namibj 8y ago
        Err, you can use CC-BY-NC the same as AGPL can be used for semi-commercial software like CockroachDB et al. Yes, a plain CC-0 or CC-BY makes it hard to sell licenses, though they are still possible, due to not being able to make it look endorsed by the original creator, which is somewhat hard in e.g. submarine ads, like those where billboards show something you don't understand for a few weeks/months, followed by a reveal that links the brand to the campaign. There are probably other usecases that are blocked/made hard by CC-BY alone, without even going to CC-BY-NC.
ipsum2 8y ago
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.
- frio 8y ago
  I switched back to Flickr when SmugMug bought them and 500px killed their API. The switch was a little harder to accomplish because I was planning to use the API to grab the originals I'd pushed to 500px and since archived, but I'm glad for it now. I guess this was the push I needed to move off the platform altogether. One of the things I prioritise when picking a platform is answering the question "how easy is it to leave?". Flickr still seems pretty easy to leave if it comes to it.
  - balladeer 8y ago
    I had deleted my Flickr account with my Yahoo account deletion as there was no way I could keep Flickr without Yahoo. When SmugMug bought Flickr I wanted to sign up and try it again. But I see that the sign up is still via Yahoo accounts. I guess it will take some more time.
    - frio 8y ago
      Yeah, I've signed up with an account that's separated from my regular online identity. Hopefully, that gets sorted; if not, it's all at arm's length anyway. I should preferably get around to hosting this stuff personally, and federating to Flickr/wherever somehow.
- TheChaplain 8y ago
  Not about licensing but someone on Reddit looked at Flickr's privacy policy and wasn't impressed; https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8v3v64/smugmug_bought_flickr_so_i_looked_over_their/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8v3v64/smugmug_bou...
ChuckMcM 8y ago
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.
brylie 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Another good one is: https://pixabay.com/ https://pixabay.com/ I use both for reference photos when painting.
est 8y ago
Photo hosting is not exactly rocket science, I think the community could invent something a distributed community using like IPFS+ActivityPub.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/ Not much yet but it's being worked on. Contribute?
RobertRoberts 8y ago
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.
pinjasaur 8y ago
[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-f6fb7de5c95a#083e https://medium.com/unsplash/the-unsplash-license-f6fb7de5c95...
- Digital-Citizen 8y ago
  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-unsplash-license-and-where-can-i-find-it https://community.unsplash.com/help-section/what-is-the-unsp... didn't work when I tried it.
AlphaWeaver 8y ago
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
Rjevski 8y ago
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 8y ago
  You could, but it won't help anyone find it. There used to be an option to filter searches by license.
TorKlingberg 8y ago
I guess we're all going back to Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
andreagrandi 8y ago
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.

250 points by keyi 8y ago

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 8y ago
> “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 8y ago
  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.
deltateam 8y ago
Choyna

whatshisface 8y ago

>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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    Stripe just cut off Bitchute, so distributed platforms are facing some clear hostility from Silicon Valley insiders.
    - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        GitHub is a great example of decentralization? In what way? I view GitHub as a centralized service.
        cwyers 8y ago
        > has the added benefit of creating an opportunity for a company to re-centralize the culture
    - 8y ago

shmerl 8y ago

Good incentive for photographers to ditch this service.

nnash 8y ago
No way, this only affects remixers who can't be bothered to shoot their own references.
- jeena 8y ago
  Not true, I release all my photos under a CC license out of principle.
  - jaysonelliot 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      > 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.
    - namibj 8y ago
      Err, you can use CC-BY-NC the same as AGPL can be used for semi-commercial software like CockroachDB et al. Yes, a plain CC-0 or CC-BY makes it hard to sell licenses, though they are still possible, due to not being able to make it look endorsed by the original creator, which is somewhat hard in e.g. submarine ads, like those where billboards show something you don't understand for a few weeks/months, followed by a reveal that links the brand to the campaign. There are probably other usecases that are blocked/made hard by CC-BY alone, without even going to CC-BY-NC.

ipsum2 8y ago

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.

frio 8y ago
I switched back to Flickr when SmugMug bought them and 500px killed their API. The switch was a little harder to accomplish because I was planning to use the API to grab the originals I'd pushed to 500px and since archived, but I'm glad for it now. I guess this was the push I needed to move off the platform altogether. One of the things I prioritise when picking a platform is answering the question "how easy is it to leave?". Flickr still seems pretty easy to leave if it comes to it.
- balladeer 8y ago
  I had deleted my Flickr account with my Yahoo account deletion as there was no way I could keep Flickr without Yahoo. When SmugMug bought Flickr I wanted to sign up and try it again. But I see that the sign up is still via Yahoo accounts. I guess it will take some more time.
  - frio 8y ago
    Yeah, I've signed up with an account that's separated from my regular online identity. Hopefully, that gets sorted; if not, it's all at arm's length anyway. I should preferably get around to hosting this stuff personally, and federating to Flickr/wherever somehow.
TheChaplain 8y ago
Not about licensing but someone on Reddit looked at Flickr's privacy policy and wasn't impressed; https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8v3v64/smugmug_bought_flickr_so_i_looked_over_their/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8v3v64/smugmug_bou...

ChuckMcM 8y ago

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.

brylie 8y ago

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 8y ago
Another good one is: https://pixabay.com/ https://pixabay.com/ I use both for reference photos when painting.

est 8y ago

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

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/ Not much yet but it's being worked on. Contribute?

RobertRoberts 8y ago

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.

pinjasaur 8y ago

[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-f6fb7de5c95a#083e https://medium.com/unsplash/the-unsplash-license-f6fb7de5c95...

Digital-Citizen 8y ago
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-unsplash-license-and-where-can-i-find-it https://community.unsplash.com/help-section/what-is-the-unsp... didn't work when I tried it.

AlphaWeaver 8y ago

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

Rjevski 8y ago

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 8y ago
You could, but it won't help anyone find it. There used to be an option to filter searches by license.

TorKlingberg 8y ago

I guess we're all going back to Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

andreagrandi 8y ago

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.