With Corbis Sale, Tiananmen Protest Images Go to Chinese Media Company; New York Times, 1/27/16

Mike McPhate, New York Times; With Corbis Sale, Tiananmen Protest Images Go to Chinese Media Company:

"Corbis, the photography archive owned by Bill Gates that includes some of the most famous pictures ever made, has sold its image and licensing division to a Chinese company.

The sale gives the new owner, Visual China Group, control over photographs of immense cultural and commercial value — Marilyn Monroe on a subway grate, Rosa Parks on a bus, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue.

But it has been the transfer of images from the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, an event that China’s Communist Party has aggressively blotted out of public view ever since, that has perhaps raised the most alarm."