For those unfamiliar with the site 500px, it started as a photo-sharing site and is now a marketplace. It is similar to Flickr, and had a touch of Reddit where photos were “upvoted/downvoted.” With so many photos (some quite nice depending on your tastes), photographers ‘jockey’ for a position on the front pages. At the time, I found 500px’s presentation of photographs interesting with a nice clean visual layout, but that was about it.
Some people had issues with the ranking system used, with good reason. The last thing I was concerned with was getting a good “affection rating.” I believe it has evolved into something different by now, but that wasn’t my major issue with the site. Quite frankly I visited the site for occasional inspiration to see others’ work. The level of quality was quite high at the start. My issue came from a copyright infringement case.
During an infringement search, I discovered a use of my photograph on a company site, let’s call it Company A. This photograph was used on their site accompanying services they offered. It was clearly commercial use. Company A did not have a license from me or any agent, but they did list a photo credit to me. I never participated in the 500px marketplace or any part of their licensing programs.
My attorney contacted Company A about the infringement as it was used without express written permission.
This is where the punchline begins to emerge folks. Do you know those big, long Terms of Service agreements that many of us go blurry-eyed trying to read? On many social media sites, they can be quite scary. Normally I see them as necessary to facilitate the sharing that goes on within these sites and related plugins. In fact, 500px now adds a summary interpretation next to these big long paragraphs, supposedly to help you understand it better. Here is a key section from their current TOS as of February 26, 2018:
That paragraph with the red arrow is where the problem is. There is a really big difference between sharing within a social media site construct, and sharing to virtually any other website unrelated to promoting 500px content. This results in the distribution of your work, distribution where a license would normally be required. The President of Company A astutely pointed this out and my attorney agreed. Company A stated they hot-linked to the image on the 500px site. They gave attribution with my name and stated they were in compliance with the 500px TOS. Company A was correct. In theory, any company could do the same thing – just hot-link a 500px image and make a photo credit, and oooh goody – free license. For a company such as 500px trying to make money from image licensing, this is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.
I did contact 500px letting them know what happened. I never received a satisfactory response or one showing concern about this particular case. The “…we will not sell your photos without your permission” doesn’t mean they won’t be potentially distributed and used anywhere without it. A loss for photographers, and the 500px business model! I left and deleted all of my photographs from their site. This clause in their terms hasn’t changed since I left them a year and a half ago.
With the breaking news that 500px is now owned by Visual China Group, I felt other photographers should know about this potential risk in the use of your work. I doubt it will get better.
** Also see fellow photographer Michael Russell’s thoughts on the subject here.
Today i saw 7 of my images sold in 500px for 0.03$ each!!!!! They are thieves. I am gonna delete my account immediately, i have over 2000 images there.
That’s awful! 🙁
It’s good of you to explain what happened so clearly. I’m not on 500pix, and hopefully similar issues won’t come up from sites I AM on, but you never know.
Mark, thank you for letting us know this. I have to admit, I have become cynical towards so many of these websites that display others’ work “for the good of the artist.” Nothing is free and we all know this but to not be straightforward (or sneaky) with their members is just plain wrong. I will remove my work as well.
My only regret is that I didn’t write about this earlier. I understand the cynicism. These days we are the product on so many of these sites.
Sorry to read about this! Here’s another story about 500px, told by a photographer I work with. An image of his sold through 500px, but for just a few bucks. The buyer was a volume customer of 500px, and had a special pricing agreement that the photographer had no say in.
That’s awful. I saw another comment about someone that recently made a sale. Commission was a whopping $0.72. At that point, why bother with licensing, just do it if you enjoy it.
Thanks for the post. I was just considering deleting my 500px account and this gave me the final nudge to do it. Feels good, man…
Wow, that’s awful. I’m glad you wrote this piece to let other photographers know to be as careful as they can. I came across an image of mine reused without my knowledge or permission fairly recently. I’m not a professional by any means but it was upsetting to me.
Indeed Susan, it is upsetting. You also don’t need to be a professional. It helps if you formally register your work, but not 100% necesssary. You own copyright no matter what, it just impacts the damages if a case is made.
Honestly, I don’t know how to register my work. Is it difficult?
It’s not too bad. More involved if you are registering published images vs non-published. You can do it yourself (lots of YouTube how-to’s) or have a service like Imagerights do it for you. I’ve done it both ways, the response time if Imagerights does it is a lot quicker for some reason (like 1-2 months vs 6-8 months response time to get your official certificate). It’s still valid from the date you file however.
Thank you for your help. I really didn’t know this could be done. It’s rather fascinating that your photos can be protected this way.
I have never been able to figure out why they allow/encourage this kind of hotlinking while simultaneously having a licensing platform either – it makes little sense. I also believe that this is precisely why it can be very difficult to remove a photograph from 500px – they are trying to preserve the hotlinked usages already in place for that image. Did the photo used by “Company A” have a 500px logo on it too?
No it did not have their logo. It had my own watermark on it. My images don’t seem to be on their servers any longer, at least the one that was used. The specific URLs came up in the correspondence.