UKC

Professional photographers group, Pro Imaging has started a new campaign against photographic competitions with unfair, "rights grabbing" rules.

If you are thinking of entering any photo competitions then read their t & c's very carefully - you may well be giving away your copyright or reproduction rights for ever just for submitting an entry.

Read more at: http://www.pro-imaging.org/content/view/203/32/

In reply to Steve Climpson: Nice, thanks for that.
jon

In reply to Steve Climpson:

In defense of such competitions, it's a legal minefield if they don't have the rights. If they were to use a picture they'd have to sort out a contract that could easily fall through. sorting things up front protects them from photographers wanting to take advantage.

If you don't like like the rules you could always not enter. I choose not too.

In reply to Steve Climpson:

The same applies to a lot of websites. You 'publish' your work on such and such a site and it gives the owner of teh site the right sto the image.

In reply to Richard Carter:
So grabbing the entire rights to all submissions is a good idea then? Surely any competition should be fair and above board and not a cover to collect a great many images for free usage and sale to 3rd parties.

I can do no better than to quote my colleague, Gordon Harrison's reply to a question on another site:

"What the sponsors of these contest get is great PR for their products, this is extremely good for business. Of course they do need the rights to reproduce winning enties as you say, but they should not acquire the rights to reproduce winning entries for ever! This is what 99.9% of all competitions demand. Why? Because they can get images virtually free and use them commercially for ever.

We need to be wary of words like "we will only use them to promote the competition", this means they can put them in a advert for a product and say the image was a winning entry in a competition, but in miniscule text somewhere. This saves them having to pay a photographer or buying an image from a stock library.

Multiply that by millions of such images and it becomes destructive to all photographers, amateur and pro. A lot of the competitions even have rules saying they cannot guarantee the photographer a credit, in fact some competition rules don't even mention you will get a credit.

The Bill of Rights allows them two years free usage of winning images to promote the competition, and only the competition - that gives them great PR, two years free usage of spectacular winning images!

At the end of two years usage the exclusive right to license the image should revert to the creator, that's a very valuable right. This exclusive right to license is automatically yours in law as soon as you create a photo and it can make you a lot of dosh from a good image!

You are absolutely right about standard practice, when you complain about rights grabbing rules the first line of defence is that "we are following standard industry practice, and we respect the rights of creators". Oh, that's alright then.

Anyway, they are now all going to be named and shamed, and as part of the campaign I can tell you we had a letter from Adobe asking us not to put them on the "Rights Off List" of competitions that I gave the link for in the first post above.

Yes, your point about entry fees may well increase is spot on, but lots of competitions already charge entry fees and want everlasting rights as well! Now surely that is just a mite greedy!"

Here's a great link on the subject of something for nothing -

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

Also read about the corbis rules which started the campaign off at:

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=742439

In reply to Henry Iddon:

Yes that's right. I understand that Facebook and flickr UK have that "right"

Pro Imaging have had a lot of interest and expressions/offers of support from photographers organisations worldwide on this issue. You wouldn't believe the amount of email traffic this topic has generated on the PI admin list.