The Bill of Rights (BoR) for Photography Competitions was developed by Pro-Imaging in the last months of 2007 and launched in March 2008. It was created as a set of conditions by which to judge the terms and conditions for photography competitions. Specifically those terms and conditions that defined the rights the entrant was to grant the organizer with respect to the entrant’s images.

As a member of the  Pro-Imaging BoR campaign team this story is written from the viewpoint of someone who dealt with the birth pangs of the BoR and has lived to see it gradually evolve and slowly build support.

One of the important constraints included in the original BoR was that terms and conditions must specify a duration for which the organizer needed usage rights with regard to the  entrants images. The BoR set the maximum term that could be claimed at five years. Therefore competitions claiming perpetual irrevocable rights to entrants images would fail to comply with the Bill of Rights and would be reported on the Rights Off List.

What was not foreseen at the time when the time limit concept was invented was that some contests maintain a historical archive of winning images, some going back decades. Such contests can have exemplary terms and conditions, doing no more than using images to promote the contest, with no attempt at any kind of commercial exploitation, yet they would fail to comply with the Bill of Rights as first developed.

Not long after launching the Bill of Rights we came across such a contest, the Nikon Small World contest which has been running annually since 1977. Pro-Imaging had discussions with Nikon Instruments, who are the organizers of the contest, and we quickly reached agreement on all the contest T&C’s with the exception of the BoR time limit, this presented a problem.  Nikon Instruments emphasized the importance of the winners archive that goes back over 30 years, both to the prestige of the contest and the honour of the winners. The contest also has a traveling exhibition that goes around the world each year, and the historical archive is an important part of the promotion of the contest.

No exploitation was going on. We accepted Nikon Instruments point of view and simply adjusted the BoR to allow an opt out from the usage time limit on a case by case basis. We did not anticipate that other contests would operate in a similar manner and so did not at that time develop proper criteria in the BoR to allow a winners archive.

However we have been coming across more instances of contests with winners archives going back decades, with exemplary rules, and we decided that the BoR should recognize the reality of this situation. It would be wrong, unjust, and detrimental to the BoR campaign to put contests on the Rights Off list just because they had maintained a winners archive. The campaign would fail to gain support from organizations who have a winners archive and who would otherwise be sympathetic to the aims of the campaign.

To address this situation we developed a set of proper criteria for the Bill of Rights that would permit a contest to have an archive of winners images, exempt from any time limit, but subject to certain conditions.  These conditions are -

1.      The archived images originate from a specific competition that runs annually, or the archived images originate from a continuous ongoing competition that runs at regular intervals such as weekly or monthly.  That is archives cannot be built from a series of unrelated contests.

2.      The archive images can only be displayed or published to promote the contest and no other purpose.

3.      The archive images will always be credited.

4.      Only winners images will be archived, where winners can include honourable mentions or shortlisted images.

5.      Where a contest wishes to use one of the archive images within Bill of Rights allowed products, such as a competition book, then that usage will still be subject to the maximum time limit set out in the Bill of Rights, i.e. within 5 years at most of the winners being announced for the contest the image was submitted to.

These provisions have been added to the Bill of Rights in order that honourable contests with excellent rules that respected artist’s rights would not fail the Bill of Rights simply because they maintained a competition winner’s archive.

Feedback from Bill of Rights Supporters to date has been positive and we look forward to being able to persuade more contest organizers to support the Bill of Rights. The BoR will continue to be kept under review, both by feedback from our supporters, and to react to whatever unforeseen situations may arise in the future. We hope that contest organizers will approach Pro-Imaging to join the Bill of Rights Supporters Group and we would like take this opportunity to say that all discussions we have with other organizations are always in complete confidence.

Pro-Imaging would like to thank PhotoLegal for giving me the opportunity to share this story on their website. Thanks to all at PhotoLegal!

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