This Gorgeous Photo-Sharing Website Is Everything Copyright ISN'T

A 100% free use photo-sharing site has is now the second-fastest growing photography website ever made (the first is Instagram). Unsplash, by creative marketing agency, Crew Labs, is a website that only publishes pictures licensed under Creative Commons Zero, meaning users are free to “copy, modify, distribute and use the photos,” for free, without the permission of the owner, according to the Unsplash licensing statement.

Credit - Greg Rakozy, Creative Commons Zero

Unsplash started as a Tumblr page with a pretty straightforward concept: the site would curate a selection of 10 images every 10 days and post them on the grounds that each photograph they published was licensed under creative commons zero. Admittedly, it was a sort of ploy to keep Crew Labs afloat—“A marketing budget? Please. We were just trying to keep the lights on,” writes Unsplash CEO Mikael Cho in a blog post—but it's a good one.

After two years of up and running by itself, Unsplash had stirred up so much activity that Crew Labs had to assemble a full time team to run it. According to Crew Labs/Unsplash co-founder, Luke Chesser, the website brings in more than 700 million photo views and 7.5 million downloads every month. The page operates on the assumption that a lot of independent artists and musicians rely on, which is that if you give the public your creative work for free, it will gain more exposure...