500px will no longer allow photographers to license their photos under CC
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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.
If you want to start a company like that you can't use credit cards. They have to use bitcoin, etc. These were the rules years before Bitchute even wrote the first line of their code.
The story has a bit more nuance than that but that's a simplified run down.
[0] http://download.blender.org/institute/Contract%20between%20G...
What? Blender was a victim to The Algorithm, not to some nefarious plot by YouTube to rid itself of the billions upon billions of free and unmonetised videos currently hosted on its platform.
It also has implications on the future of all other videos. If it's actually an intentional plan to take down free videos, then that means we can expect the people who made this decision on blender to continue their plan and take down other free videos. But if it's an algorithm mistake, we don't expect it to become more widespread, and hopefully the algorithm will be tweaked so that it will actually become less widespread.
This thread is about a company (500px) intentionally taking down free content for business purposes to make more money. Saying that youtube is doing the same thing is false.
It could also have been an intentional trial balloon, to test the waters to see how much they can get away with. Politicians do that kind of thing all the time.
I don't think we have enough information to say for certain what really happened.
https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende... has been updated. (and you are correct.)
https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
speak: YouTube.
Also, most KA videos have views in the thousands (usually less than 10k).
Most Blender videos have views in the tens/hundreds of thousands.
(Also I would like to point out that I don't think anyone at Google had an evil plan to delete Blender, it was probably "The Computer".)
E.g.:
The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that “nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books … by any person not a citizen of the United States.” Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers “indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement.” The tendency to reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent.
The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon’s Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright...
So, that's like a parent telling a high schooler not to drink, when they had a fake id and everything in their age...
This argument is so bizarre. If I committed murder in high school should I not be allowed to tell my high schooler not to commit murder? (Yes, that example is a ridiculous extreme but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.)
Simply put, "Two wrongs don't make a right."
It's rather the "don't deny the ladder you used to get up to people that came there later" argument.
And even more so, don't pretend you're somehow inherently holier than them for not using such a ladder anymore -- now that you're already on the higher level, and fiercely step on the fingers of anybody else trying to climb themselves...
The "holiness" and self-restraint in the matter would have to be judged when you're both starting from the same level.
As to whether copyright infringement is a bad thing, I'm not sure. It sure is an artificial barrier to the "free market", to which many people in favour of, pay lip service to. Especially ridiculous Disney/Sonny Bono flavoured copyright extensions...
If anything, the US good the right thing bad then, and is doing the bad thing now...
For me it doesn't hold when an individual or small business invents a unique product only to have their product design stolen and sold at knock-off prices removing any chance they have at reinvesting and continuing to produce additional unique products.
The "don't deny the ladder" argument is still a bizarre mindset. There are lots of laws that come into place after a situation where someone has already made lots of money via exploiting the thing that the law now explicitly prevents. Specifically because the now illegal thing was shown to be wrong.
Some obvious extreme examples:
Child labor, legal prior to the 1900s. Should China be putting pre-teens in factories for 16 hours as well without any guilt because "The US did it while it was bootstrapping."?
Slavery, the United States used slave labor in the establishment of it's economy. Should China be allowed to use slavery?
If your counter argument is, "Well those are humanitarian issues violating individual rights where copyright isn't." then you're just attempting to divide what's considered wrong into "more or less morally acceptable shades of your own making" which doesn't have the effect of suddenly making those more morally acceptable things now acceptable within the greater opinion of humanity at large. Simply put, "Yes, there is scale but copyright infringement is still on the 'wrong' side currently within our society."
If you want to argue that copyright infringement is the right thing to do on the grounds that all copyright infringement is inherently good then I'm willing to accept that's your stance.
If your stance is still, it's "OK" for China to engage in copyright infringement (when you think copyright infringement is wrong) just because the United States did it 160 years ago, then you're holding what to me is a viewpoint based on your own bias towards wanting it to be "OK" for China to engage in copyright infringement and your rationalizing why after the fact.
Gotta admit, you made me chuckle.
Not if you profited from it and still live off of those profits.
Is there a question that the US profited economically earlier on from it's lax copyright on foreign IP? And that it was part of what bootstrapped its economy?
Or is that just mock outrage, despite the fact that I didn't bring up that specific analogy?
If people need alternatives to 500px, Flickr allows CC-licensed photos, and recently got sold to Smugmug. Hopefully they'll keep the licensing intact.
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.
It's still a liberal/free license but they're now using a custom license under their control and have also accepted 7.25M funding round so they could also become hostile in future. For this reason I'm hesitant to rely on their APIs and only maintain and use offline copies of photos I like.
> The funds being invested today will be going toward defining a new economic model around photography. It won’t be a model where photos are going to be paid for with cryptocurrency. It will be a model that leverages the unprecedented distribution Unsplash photos gain to bring as many opportunities to contributors as possible while maintaining the open, free-to-use principles of the community.
- https://medium.com/unsplash/we-just-raised-7-25-million-for-...
https://fstoppers.com/business/why-you-should-never-upload-y...
As someone who is not a photographer, I only follow photographers on Instagram. FWIW.
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.
Everyone needs to know about the "legal extortion" that Getty uses with their stock photography.
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.
[0]: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1013464718923718658
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.
The Internet Archive also allows you to upload photos, and has a slideshow display for multiple photo collections
I use both for reference photos when painting.
- Unsplash license: https://unsplash.com/license
- Compare with CC0: https://medium.com/unsplash/the-unsplash-license-f6fb7de5c95...
"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 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 CC0 is a non-copyleft free software license when applied to computer software.
[1] https://community.unsplash.com/help-section/what-is-the-unsp... didn't work when I tried it.
One could argue that the might work on being more efficient about their fixed costs but this seems a simpler fix.
Not much yet but it's being worked on. Contribute?
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.
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.
I'm mostly an amateur photographer and only occasionally do payed work anyway. Most of my work with models is TFP (Time for print), and then I negotiate that those pictures become CC too.