Pro-Imaging

What People Lose 

In running such contests the sponsors gain positive PR – handsome prizes, happy winners – while robbing entrants of the rights to their own creative work, rights which by default the law assigns to them.

This is a clever ploy, since most people do not understand their rights, or the potential value of their work. Bad enough for the individual who is being ripped off by such competitions – but worse, such competitions damage photography in general. How? Because when organiser companies can get collections of free images they are less likely to buy photography.

 

How Rights Work

You take a photograph, you could be an amateur photographer, or a professional, or you are just taking a snap for the family album, the law grants everyone equal rights. The instant you take the photograph the law makes you the copyright owner of that photograph. There are no forms to fill, you don't need to register your photograph, you just need to press the button on your camera! You are now a copyright owner!

Licensing

Normally you would only give permission to someone to use your photograph in return for a fee payable to you. This arrangement is known as licensing. In other words, to give your permission you draw up a license document for someone who wants to use your photograph.

The license document will spell out how long they can use the photograph, what it can be used for (e.g. one specific usage, say in a book, or a particular advert), and where it can be used, in one country for example, or throughout Europe, or worldwide. The greater the rights requested, say usage for two years instead of one, or to have multiple uses, the greater will be the license fee you charge them.

When the license expires the image must cease being used by the person the license was granted to. They can apply to you for another license of course, and you will charge another fee. This is how creative people such as photographers, writers, and poets for example earn a living but Rights Grabbers feel it is so tiresome to have to pay people for the products of their creativity so they run contests to rip off the unwary.

 

People Are Being Ripped Off!

However, through photo competitions and similar devices, the greedy and less than ethical world of corporate business and publicly funded bodies such as national and local goverment are using means by which they can get your images for free to use for ever for any purpose they like, even to license them to other businesses and make a great deal of money from your free images. You never see a penny. You could find that you would like to object to the manner they are being used, perhaps to promote a product you would not approve of, but you will find that you have lost the right to object too.

So how is this done? You enter a photo into a competition. You haven't read the terms and conditions, have you? Its really boring all that small print stuff, isn't it? So you didn't notice that by submitting the photo the organisations involved in the contest are claiming copyright of your photo, or maybe they are 'just' claiming the right to use it freely for ever.

Submit your photographs to such competitions and you lose valuable rights to your photo. If they have claimed the copyright it's no longer yours, you could actually be sued for using it in future. Or maybe they have claimed the right to use it freely for ever, to make money from it by licensing it to others, but you'll never see one penny of that money earned by licensing your photograph. You probably didn't win a prize either, but the contest organiser won a prize from all those who entered the competition!

If you never knew that you were going to be ripped off simply for entering a photo contest, I hope you are feeling a bit angry and will read the T&C's in future!

 

Tax Payer's funds used to Fund Rights Grabbing

You may have been surprised to have seen it mentioned above that national and local governments are involved in rights grabbing. You would think that they would respect the rights of artists since they are the bodies that draft and uphold the law and would therefore expect them to hold the moral highground.

You would be naive to believe that.  They are grubbing around along with the worst of the rights grabbers. In fact they often employ the worst terms imaginable to rob people of their rights. Publicly funded bodies are delighted to be able to use tax payers money to organise rights grabbing photo competitions. On those occasions that we have discussed the matter with them they take the view that it is right and proper that the citizens within their domain should give freely of their creativity to the city council, goverment department, national embassy, etc.

Strangely enough, when asked, they don't expect such largesse from builders, road menders, fuel supply companies, all of whom have to be paid. But the public are seen by public authorities as easy prey, keen to hand over their creativity for nothing. Don't let them have it!

 

Everyone should be aware that they have the same rights, and that they need to protect them.

Too many competition organisers are stealing your pictures, stealing your creativity, stealing your skills, stealing your unique vision. Such things are worth infinitely more than any competition prize. 

Tell your friends and colleagues, your associations, your forums, your political representatives, and your local and national news outlets about this. Refer them to this article.

 

Contact Pro-Imaging

If you can help in a practical way, by spreading the news for example, or if you have particular skills and expertise - in copyright law perhaps, or you know of competitions not on our lists –  Pro-Imaging would like to hear from you.  There is a competitions campaign contact form  - enter your enquiry there and we will respond as soon as we can.

Thanks for reading this far – and we hope you will now ignore all rights grabbing competitions and spread the word about our campaign. If you do this, together we can defeat the rights grabbers!!

 

Latest News

You can keep up to date through our competition diary which is published at intervals with the latest news. The competition diaries are available here. If you would like an individual logo to use on your website to declare that you support the Bill of Rights for Photography Competitions you will find details in the latest competition diary.