Commons:500px licensing data

After the 2018 announcement of 500px that they will not support Creative Commons licenses, and will remove the files, the Archive Team started an effort to save those files. Check their wiki.

After discussion at the Village Pump (check it), Wikimedia Commons volunteers decided to import files with caution; as there are ~210k files saved by Archive Team, some are out of scope (the minority), and some copyvio also. The community developed a tool to select files and import them via OAuth.

Tool

• import-500px It's in development; if you want to help, use the talk page here.

You can also contribute using to import, still in development, so bugs will eventually happen.

The tool allows users to view the pictures and metadata, select, and then import, solving the issue raised by the community that saw it problematic to import all files at once. Also a better solution that volunteers download all files, select and than massive uploads...

The only draw-back is the slow Internet Archive server, so to help in this project, you will need to be zen. We can use the 500px server to import, but they already deleted a good part of the photos, so you will not be able to see all pictures.

How to verify the license

After the announcement of 500px, they removed any Creative Commons license tags from their pages, and didn't delete the majority of files, as promised, infringing the CC licenses...^{[clarification needed]}

So to verify the license you can "manually" ding into the source code of the 500px page (until this moment is on air) and also to the 500px page stored at web.archive.org.

Using File:Cereal Field At Sunrise (199200911).jpeg as example:

500px

Going to the correspondent 500px page you can see the license snippet in the source code, including a link to the license:

<a about="https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/199200911/q%3D80_m%3D2000/v2?webp=true&sig=51421b73dbd5c42c71736cd4ac48b2e511d4a4ff63fa645fa67a10b4265d195b" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" id="server_photo_cc_license" rel="license"></a>

archive.org

Check the existence of the snippet "license_type": 4 on that page by viewing the source code.

And you can confirm that 4 there means CC-BY in the 500px API documentation (version 3.0 can be confirmed in the archived version of the 500px CC page).

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Obviously it's a lot of work to confirm a license; for that reason Chicocvenancio created a page for each photo with that data, eg, in the tool.

This all does not at all mean all photos marked with valid CC licenses in 500px are fine from a license perspective; FoP and other considerations may apply. There are also copyright violations that were uploaded directly to 500px. For that reason, the software developed allows us select files.

Workflow

1. Find a way to import files verifying the license, and able to select the files; (done)
2. Creation of tool (already on, but with room to improvements);
3. Import using import-500px (~28% read);
4. Categorization, renaming, improvement of descriptions;
5. Report.

Review

Old tables moved to Commons:500px licensing data/Old and Commons:500px licensing data/Old 2. Probably don't need them anymore.

Files without license on 500px today that were already reviewed are okay.