Our next episode when we return in September will be a discussion on rights grabs by photo competitions and we’ll be joined by a representative of Pro-imaging – an organisation which is currently running a campaign to identify competitions which harvest rights from photographers. They have published an ‘Artists Bill of Rights’ which sets out uses which they consider to be reasonable use of images entered into competitions and encourage competition organisers to write their terms and conditions to comply with it.
Please read the bill of rights and the wording of the petition (given below), then consider signing our petition.
The wording of the petition is as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban companies from grabbing the intellectual property rights to photographs in carefully worded competition terms and conditions.
It has become common practice for companies and organisations to run photographic competitions for the purpose of harvesting large volumes of photographs from entrants which can then be used by the competition owner and/or sponsors at no cost. These competitions rely on 1) people not reading the terms and conditions, 2) the t&c’s being difficult to locate and/or 3) the wording of the t&c’s being difficult to understand.
The property being harvested from vast numbers of photographers (mainly consumers) is of great value to these companies who grant themselves the right to use the images in marketing campaigns and advertising, use on products and packaging and even in some cases resale and syndication.
We call on the Prime Minister to look at this issue during the Government’s current review of intellectual property law, and to examine the ‘Artists Bill of Rights’ promoted by the photographic organisation ‘Pro-Imaging’ which calls for only limited rights (such as the right to use the images to promote the competition etc) to be taken by competition organisers.
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It’s a shame this wasn’t a topic for the last podcast, as it’s an issue I wanted to address to Kate Day.
On her Telegraph Blog she runs a photo competition, entry to which similarly requires the handover of pretty much every imaginable right over one’s work to the Telegraph. Certainly put me off participating.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/katedaycomp/discuss/72157619412517661/
In that discussion she stated some reasons for the T&Cs but that isn’t reflective of their content or their potential consequences should someone at the Telegraph decide they want to use or sell an image without consent from or reward for the photographer.
Also she states that she “can’t have T&Cs specific to the competition” – perhaps in the forthcoming podcast the issue of why it’s not possible to do this could be examined.
Photo Competitions — Petition to the Prime Minister http://bit.ly/lh60l
The photo competition on my Telegraph blog is covered by the general terms and conditions for Telegraph.co.uk. Anyone who submits material to the Telegraph site retains the copyright of that material but the Telegraph is granted a licence to publish, distribute, edit it and so on.
These terms and conditions are more extensive that I would ideally like for the competition. I would never use images submitted to the competition for any other purpose and the use of these pictures elsewhere on the site or in the paper is very unlikely as I don’t add them to the Telegraph photo libraries.
However, I would be more comfortable if the competition had its own Ts&Cs setting this out. This is something I hope I will get in time but, as I’m sure you can imagine, the lawyers here are pretty busy and this isn’t their first priority.
So more time pressures than conspiracy but I appreciate this may mean you’d rather not submit images until this is made clear.
Can’t see what the problem is here. If you don’t like the terms and conditions (and I think you’re over-egging how hard they are to find and understand) don’t enter the competition. Sure it would be great it they didn’t have those rights-grabbing terms, but they shouldn’t be legally prevented from doing so if that’s what they want to do.
Kate, surely you can make the Telegraph aware of the image creators ‘rights’ and that their ’standard’ Terms and Conditions are an abuse of their rights to own and retain copyright and to ‘Rights Manage’ any image entered into a Competition solely for that Competition…? If you want help on this matter, may I politely refer you to http://pro-imaging.org and have a look at the ‘Bill of Rights’ that they have successfully negotiated with many large competition organisers and operaters… It’s good publicity for the Telegraph if they adopt the ‘Bill of Rights’ as they can then use the Logo to help promote the rights of image creators.. and yes, as a Professional Photographer, I am a member of Pro-Imaging and the National Union of Journalists…
@demon, this is exactly the kind of approach I would favour personally. I’ll certainly pass on your comment.
Photo Competitions – Petition to the Prime Minister http://bit.ly/lh60l Please ask your UK friends to sign. Help protect creative rights.
Newspapers, magazines, corporate entities always seem to think that photographers and artists are fair game to be ripped off on their copyright. However these same entities claim full copyright on their products.
If these ‘ people’ claim copyright on their material, they must of course treat all suppliers in the same fashion. Otherwise, surely in law they, themselves have no right to protect their own copyright ?
In other words they cant have it both ways !
Kevin Fitzmaurice-Brown
[...] has recently submitted a petition to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown calling on him to tackle rights harvesting in the Government’s current review [...]