corbis

Demotix Photographers Still Waiting a Year After Corbis Sold to VCG

After Bill Gates sold Corbis Images to Visual China Group (VCG) back in January 2016, the citizen journalism photo agency Demotix (which Corbis bought in 2012) suddenly went dark. Now, after over a year has passed since the Corbis sale, some Demotix contributors have finally received an email from VCG... with few happy answers.

A Glimpse Into Iron Mountain’s Mine, Home of Many Iconic Photo Originals

In rural Butler, Pennsylvania, hidden away 220 feet under the hills is one of the most valuable priceless photo collections in the world. That's where a company called Iron Mountain helps store Corbis gigantic collection of historical photos in a refrigerated, maximum security vault.

We've taken a couple of looks at this vault in the past, once in 2011 and again in 2014. The 6-minute video above is yet another look at Iron Mountain's fascinating facility: in addition to showing the photo collection in the mines, it takes a step back and gives us a better picture of what the whole underground operation is like.

Corbis Charges Hefty Fees for Freely Available Public Domain Photos

If you come across any photograph published in the US before 1923, you're free to use it for whatever purpose you'd like, with or without permission, and with or without attribution. Why? Because its copyright has expired and it's public domain.

Strangely enough, sometimes free public domain photos get sold as stock photos, and those who don't know any better may pay large sums to use something they could have used for free.

Citizen Journalism Photo Agency Demotix Snatched Up by Corbis

Corbis, one of the largest photo agencies in the world, has agreed to acquire Demotix, a crowd-sourced citizen journalism photo agency that was founded in 2008. Corbis had already picked up a piece of the young agency through an investment last year, but now it has decided to purchase the whole company outright. The acquisition price was not disclosed.

Millions of Photos from the Sygma Archive May Soon be Destroyed

In 1999 Corbis -- privately owned by Bill Gates -- paid $20 million to acquire Sygma, a legendary photo agency that was the largest in the world at the time. After the acquisition, the agency bled money and suffered heavy fines due to the mismanagement of photographs, paying $2 million at one point for losing 750 of one photojournalist's photos. In 2010 the new agency, named Corbis Sygma, filed for bankruptcy after its debt had risen to €73m (~$100 million). Now the court appointed administrator of the defunct company is saying that millions of images in the collection may be destroyed after a failed attempt to sell them at auction.