As we
reported last week Visual China Group (VCG) in China was forced to close down its website over the issue of offering the “Black Hole” photograph without giving “clear and visible” credit as required by the Creative Commons license.
VCG closed its website around 20:00, 11th April. China’s Cybersecurity Agency staff had talks with the VCG management team late at night and demanded that the staff explain why they were selling images tagged with “sensitive and harmful information.” The Cybersecurity Agency will be overseeing changes in VCG’s methods of operation. Four days later the site has not re-opened. It is unclear when that might happen.
Since the closing VCG has been changing its web addresses and email addresses on a very frequent basis. One photographer reports that he received two different change notices in a single day on the 15th. Such website closures often occur when the Chinese government is blocking a web address. At that point the organization finds it necessary to moves to a new web address in order to continue to function.
Most often this type of closure has seemed to occur when a foreign company is trying to do business in China and the Chinese wants to force the company to partner with a Chinese company. This kind of action has been taken against iStockphoto and Shutterstock in the past, but it is curious that it is happening to a Chinese entity.
On April 12th the search word ranked number 1 on Weibo (China main social media website) was “VCG.” There were more than 130 million reads of related posts. Not only individual social media, KOL accounts, but also government or official media (People's Daily, CCTV, etc.) discussed how VCG did its business and what is the right way to protect copyright.
According to sources in China it appears that both creators and customers are upset with the company.
Chinese photographers and stock photo agency groups appear to be concerned about non-attribution in general. Based on comments it appears that in certain cases VCG has “failed” to credit individuals that created certain pictures and then sold them as though they were VCG owned property. There were also questions about whether royalties were paid for such uses.
Customers also seemed to question VCG’s mode of operation. Many individual and social media enterprises indicated that VCG had contacted them in the past about illegal usage of images and then “forced” them to sign year based contracts. In such cases the price per-image-used would then be just several hundreds RMB rather than several thousands or tens of thousands RMB which would have been a normal per-image price. (1 RMB or Chinese yuan is worth about $0.15.)
The total prices for these annual contracts tended to be in the range of 100K to 1 million RMB ($15,000 to $150,000). It is unclear how many images the customers were allowed to download for these prices. Many customers seemed to hate this kind of extortion and saw an opportunity to attack VCG.
The share price of VCG fell 10 percent on the news.