Demotix agency was set up in 2009 as an arena for citizen journalists to help and promote the freedom of speech and journalism. What started as a little startup became a major player in the photojournalism scene. According to the company information they had about 50,000 photographers from 190 locations around the world.
In 2012 Demotix was purchased by the failing stock photography agency Corbis Images ( owned by Bill Gates).Two days ago  all Demotix agency photographers found the agency website inaccessible. And all the links led to Corbis website that announced the sales of Corbis to a Chinese media group and eventually Getty Images.

None of Demotix contributors received an email, many of them still have to be paid for their work. Demotix team is silence and neither the angency's twitter account nor its Facebook pages, are providing any information or any answer.

Following the purchase of Demotix by Corbis back in 2012. Corbis became one of the sales channel of Demotix (ironically the sales has been reduced and the payment became some kind of a joke). But Corbis made sure the separation will exist, they built accounts for Demotix photographers but they were not able to access them and kept accessing their account through Demotix site.

Even in the best times a Demotix contributor knew about a sale 3-6 months after it happened. Until a certain point there was trust between the managing team and the contributors, that started deteriorating after the Corbis deal. Blocking the access to the contributor prevent them from contacting each other or withdrawing crucial information from each account toward a law suit and actually giving time to the big brother to temper with the databases.

Demotix owe money to many of his contributors, many of them would not like to see their images flushed down the royalty free toilet of Getty images. But the worse betrayal is the team of Demotix mostly amateurs, placed instead of the old team after the purchase.,  a team that would never survive without the help of the contributors, they kept and still keeping silence.

Personally  I have more then 7000 pictures on Demotix in around 700 stories, and I don't  want them to be added to Getty's database  furthermore I want to be compensated for the time and money spent on making these stories, uploading them, managing and whatever needed to keep my account usable. I never signed up with Getty I signed up with Demotix.