I had images on 500px several years ago, but cancelled my membership when I heard they were bought out. Just recently I discovered some of my images on Getty Images.
Pretty sure I never gave 500px to continue using my images or licensing them to anyone else.
Any idea if they are submitted by a business, or if by someone posing as a photographer? Have you tried contacting Getty?
The AI message is particularly problematic. Not only can they do all sorts of edits, they are likely to want a copyright of AI edited photos that the original images, at best, came off buried permissions in a EULA or were flat out stolen off the internet. So no telling content origin of the image they now try to claim as theirs
I don’t recall the details now, but I think there was some indication that when 500px was sold (at least I think that is what happened) that the buye’s were likely to end up with access to images and little likelihood that the owners would respect IP rights or that photographers could do anything about it.
Lots of us immediately deleted all of our photographs on the service. (Fortunately I had not posted a whole lot there when this happened.)
Both Getty Images and 500px removed all my photos after my complaints.
No idea if either of them collected any money from the sale of my images. I certainly did not.
Of course nowadays it is very simple for your images to be used by anyone else, and nearly impossible and too costly to try and be compensated for copyright infringement when it happens in countries anywhere in the world.
EB-1 wrote:
I could swear that Dan had replied a few days ago as Post #2 and then it disappeared after a time. It's weird.
EBH
I had briefly posted a reply early on, but I deleted the post soon after.
It is true that a lot of copyright violations are simply impossible to police, particularly those done internationally. You can watermark, register your copyright, restrict the size of your images... and someone will still find a way to use them. (I found someone using one of mine as their company's logo!)
On the other hand, if your photographs are not out there at all... these days almost no one will see them. And there still are art directors scrolling through images in Google and elsewhere who find stuff and license it.
