121–130 of 282 posts
"This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images." Sweet summer child
My main association with Getty is their 'copyfraud' practises where they claim public domain images (NASA, Library of Congress etc) as their own and sell licenses[0]. They're also well known for aggressive acquisitions[1]. Perhaps this a good time to create a mirror [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyrigh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions
This reminds me of 500px. I used to be a huge fan of 500px. It was the most beautiful photography site on the internet, designed with attention to every tiny detail. It allowed you to share your photos under a CC license, presented them beautifully and had fantastic curated feeds with photos by fantastic photographers. In 2018 they were acquired by an investor company and partnered exclusively with Getty. As a contri…
> In 2016, we first met the Getty Images team. We weren’t sure they would see the world the same way we did given their business was largely built on licensing. Over years of conversations, however, we learned about the level of respect they had for the Unsplash community and the rights of creators to choose how and where their imagery is made available.
While this is written as though they had initially misunderstood Getty, it doesn't clarify at all how things have evolved. My unvarnished reading is "We were worried about Getty because they're all about copyright, but after talking for years, we've learned they're really all about copyright."
After reading this, I think your lack of optimism is warranted.
I'm going to instead see this as an opportunity for something better to emerge. My biggest problem with Unsplash is that they did not use a standard license that would easily be compatible with a Creative Commons or open source licensed work. If I incorporated images from Unsplash, suddenly I couldn't say "you're welcome to do whatever you like with my work." In fact, they used to use a CC0 license, but then changed,…
You start losing out on SEO rankings, and then contributors, and finally content. This also makes it harder to invest in usability features like curation and search (photo search is complicated!).
I’d love to understand any ideas on how to create open CC0 aggregators without the game theory seemingly stacked against you.
(Disclosure: I work on content at Canva. We own Pexels and Pixabay).
This reminds me of 500px. I used to be a huge fan of 500px. It was the most beautiful photography site on the internet, designed with attention to every tiny detail. It allowed you to share your photos under a CC license, presented them beautifully and had fantastic curated feeds with photos by fantastic photographers. In 2018 they were acquired by an investor company and partnered exclusively with Getty. As a contri…
https://www.pexels.com/ is another similar site, owned by Canva which seems to have kept its quality through the years.
"This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images." Sweet summer child
What is it about being the CEO of a startup that causes people to believe these promises?
I recently discovered Pexels for anyone looking for other sources after this. https://www.pexels.com
Very slick, and fast. But how do they pay for the site? There are no ads and no monetization I could find. The claim 4 billion image views a month, that has to cost them some bandwidth...
Pexels has affiliate ads (to paid stock sites) in specific locations; as an example, when your search returns zero Pexels results.
Pexels content is also syndicated to Canva, where it is free to use (under the same license) by several hundred million users. This helps us provide a better Canva user experience, while giving more exposure to work on Pexels.
"This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images." Sweet summer child
What is it about being the CEO of a startup that causes people to believe these promises?
My main association with Getty is their 'copyfraud' practises where they claim public domain images (NASA, Library of Congress etc) as their own and sell licenses[0]. They're also well known for aggressive acquisitions[1]. Perhaps this a good time to create a mirror [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyrigh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions
Daniel Wolf pulled off what may have been the greatest legal art caper of all time: Over the course of two years in the early 1980s, he quietly amassed some 25,000 classic and contemporary photographs, buying them from the world’s most renowned collectors on behalf of his client the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
He was so secretive that none of the sellers knew about the others, or about their buyer — a stealthiness that allowed him, and the Getty, to pay about $17 million, “less than the price of a moderately good Cezanne still life,” said John Walsh, the director of the Getty at the time, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.
...
But nothing made quite as big a splash as the Getty acquisition. It not only gave an institutional imprimatur to collecting photography; it also soaked up a sizable chunk of supply, making the remaining works on the market much more valuable.
“Suddenly, absolutely overnight, 25,000 of the rarest photographs ever taken were off the market,” said Weston Naef, who helped Mr. Wolf plan the acquisition for the Getty and later became its first curator of photography. “It would be like someone removing half the gold from Fort Knox.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/arts/daniel-wolf-dead.htm...