Pro-Imaging

Arrangements for Charities & Non-Profit Organisations

Throughout this section the term 'charity' is to be interpreted as including non-profit organisations.

Charities frequently organise photography contests as a way of promoting their cause and also as a way of raising resources to further the charity's aims. Often charities claim via the terms and conditions permanent and irrevocable usage rights to the images entrants submit to the contest. Charity or not this practice of simply claiming via the small print extensive usage rights for entering the contest is still looked on as a rights grab and often causes friction between charities and photographers.

On the other hand charities have aims that many people will have sympathy with and there should be some provision in the Bill of Rights that recognises the special status of charities. Charities are generally resourced on the basis of voluntary donations by willing members of the public who support the charity's aims. It is the principle of voluntary donation that we have adopted to enable the Bill of Rights to give charities the potential of acquiring rights in excess of those set out in the Bill of Rights.

Rules for photography contests organised by charities would still adhere to all the standards set out in the Bill of Rights. However, a charity can add a special 'donate' section on the entry form which would detail to the entrant the additional rights the charity would like donated to them. This procedure will operate on an opt-in basis, thus the entrant will need to say they are willing to donate the additional rights requested by ticking a check box or other similar action. Entrants not donating these additional rights would still be eligible to win prizes.

This principle of additional rights being given to the charity on the basis of voluntary donation not only respects the rights of the entrants to the contest, it is simply an extension of the basis upon which charities raise funds by appeals to the public, in this case the appeal is not for funds but for image usage rights.

Entrants who would like to enter the contest but not donate additional rights to the charity can do so. In such a case the charity would only be granted the rights set out in the rules, which would comply with the Bill of Rights, but it should be noted that these rights will still enable the charity to promote the charities aims by publishing a book for example.

The 'donate' procedure enables charities to obtain any usage rights for as long as they want for any usage with the exception of copyright, waiving of moral rights, and exclusive usage.

Competition Winners Archive

Some competitions have a winner's archive where they can display the winners of previous instances of that competition, and in long running contests this archive can go back decades. They act as a roll call of honour and can be seen as conferring prestige on both the contest and those listed as previous winners.

The Bill of Rights requires a time limit to be set on usage of contest entrant's images and this provision, if unqualified, would not permit the creation of a Competition Winners Archive. Therefore the Bill of Rights makes a provision for the creation and maintenance of a Competition Winner's Archive subject to the following conditions.

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 winner's 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.

This provision has 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.