This is almost a sad day for the photo community. VCG has been suing Chinese startups and companies for licensing rights for a while [1], many of the licensed photographs appear in "free" or "CC0" websites. A year ago, we received a request of paying a 50k RMB penalty for a set of images downloaded from free CC0 websites as well as a set of images previously appeared in PetaPixel which then quoted from 500px in 2014 (this was before VCG's investment in 500px) - however VCG claims they have copyrights on them. The way to waive this penalty is to buy VCG bulk licenses or sign agreements with VCG to purchase their products (if you buy stuff from us, we won't charge you from the previous infringement issues!). When asked about why these photos show up in full resolution in free websites in the first place, they didn't provide a clear answer. One reason is that it is difficult to shutdown "pirated" and free image hosting sites created under individuals. For all these penalty or payments collected, VCG almost never repay the contributor or photographer. But I guess neither does their counterparts in the U.S. (this is a much larger issue that I won't expand here).

So if company A used 500px's image in 2014 before VCG's investment, and company B quoted company A's article, and you re-tweet or re-blogged company B's article, VCG (who now has copyrights in China for 500px images) might go after you to collect penalty but never contact A nor B.

Advise to startups : to make sure you don't infringe any copyrights, do a reverse search on VCG's database (especially you have market in China) as well as Getty's/shutter stock's database and never trust unsplash-ish websites (they also have no model releases that will get you in trouble). These stuff could bite you back in years if you have a photo floating somewhere in your public Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account.

Now that VCG has acquired 100% of 500px, what would (or could) happen is they will crawl anyone who has referenced 500px photos in China and start to threaten to sue in exchange for opportunity to gain more subscribers for their media library. Last year a couple of social media accounts on Wechat was forced to shutdown by this [2]. VCG quotes different penalty for different images, and it is usually 1000 RMB per image.

[1] https://xueqiu.com/8818667120/74351790

[2] https://www.zhihu.com/question/48400883