Mearle wrote:
A limited number of pics there since they allow easy reposting of the images to at least  6 other sites without your specific permission. From there, who knows where else your images will wind up?

Andy Pearlman wrote:
Which leads to something I've been wondering about. How come hardly anyone puts even so much as a credit line on their photos, much less a watermark? I looked at maybe 8 pages after visiting this thread, and maybe a dozen at a previous time, and I think I've seen one photographer with watermarks, and hardly any other attribution. There is some great photography there, isn't anyone worried about image theft these days (with all the "someone used my image without permission" threads on MM, you'd think people would be more cautious. I wonder how many of these photographers even register their copyrights?

I could think of a couple of reasons.

1) Blatant watermarks are distracting to the image.
2) Distractions can lead to being less likely to be liked/voted on.

Given the nature of what kind of drives the site. Fortunately in terms of image thieves, many are too stupid not to strip the exif data from them, and I think in the long run it's easier to prove the ownership of a largely distributed image and easily-found-again from one source, than an image buried in some corner of the internet that got stolen (even with a watermark I still see it done).

The third reason:

3) Could be because some people on 500px, actually believes the right click disabling actually protects them hehe.