Pro-Imaging

British Council Creative Cities Competition ends 13 March 2008

The Rules of this Contest

Listed below are extracts from the rules of this competition. These extracts detail the rights being claimed from entrants.

"§ 6. LICENSE

6.1. By submitting photos and videos to the Competition in the manner specified above, participants grant the British Council a worldwide, royalty-free license, and perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright or other exclusive right) license to:

a) use the photos and videos;

b) reproduce them (including the following means of reproduction: printing, reprography, magnetic recording and digital recording);

c) distribute them (including the offering of this material on the market or the lending of this material for use without remuneration or leasing); and

d) display and perform (including by public performance, playing, screening, performing playback, broadcasting and retransmitting, as well as making the photos and videos publicly available so that anyone may access them in a place and time chosen by them).

6.2. Participants also allow the British Council to prepare, use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform derivative works of the photos and videos.

6.3. The British Council may sub-license the photos and videos as well as transfer the license to a third party without the prior consent of any of the participants.

6.4. The British Council shall respect the moral rights of the participants by indicating their authorship whenever the photos or videos are communicated to the public, in a way customary for the given type of media. Any other obligations of the British Council are expressly excluded.

6.5. For the avoidance of doubt, the British Council may use any photos or videos submitted to the Competition in a manner consistent with the above license. The British Council is not obliged to publish or distribute in any other form any photos or videos."

Results of Testing the Rules

Listed below are the results of the tests we carried out on this competition's rules. The tests are all based on the standards set out in The Bill of Rights. By adopting these standards competition organisers can create competition rules that meet the needs of organisers and are fair and respectful to the rights of entrants. For each test a result is given which can be Pass of Fail. Competitions that pass all these tests go on The Rights On List, those that don't go on The Rights Off List.

If the rules are vague and we cannot determine whether the rules pass a particular test or not the result is shown as Unclear.  Where a test is not necessary the result is shown as N/A.

Click on any result below for more information about that specific test.

1 Copyright & Moral Rights 

• Pass, All photographers entering the contest retain their copyright
• Pass, The contest does not require any entrants to waive moral rights
• Pass, Rules state a credit is always given to the photographer when the image is published
  
• Pass, All the documents that must be completed by each entrant to participate in or win a contest are shown
  

2 Free Usage Durations Claimed

• Fail, The organisers free usage is time limited as per The Bill of Rights
  
• Fail, The sponsors free usage is time limited as per The Bill of Rights
• N/A, Book usage is time limited as per The Bill of Rights
  
• Fail, free usage only promotes the contest or is used for a book 

3 Commercial Usage Rights Claimed

• Pass, A statement clarifying the commercial usage position is present as per The Bill of Rights
• Fail, Commercial usage is rights managed & time limited as per The Bill of Rights
• Pass, Entrants are not required to sign commercial usage licenses

4 Declarations

• Pass, The organisations that acquire rights are all named
• Fail, This (or last) years Judges are named along with brief bio details

5 Contest End Date

• Pass, The contest end date is within 16 months of the contest being announced

Conclusions

This contest fails The Bill of Rights because -

If you submit an image to this contest, although you can continue to license your image non-exclusively, you will lose forever the right to exclusively license your image. 

This contest is not recommended.

Note that the British Council receives substantial public funds from the UK taxpayer (£189M in 2006/7), ask whether this competition is a proper use of public funds in that it seeks to remove some IP rights from the participants. The UK government is currently considering the Gowers review that it commissioned to strengthen UK Intellectual Property law. Pro-Imaging consider it astonishing that a government who, having already spent considerable sums of money considering means of better protection for creators rights, is in fact also funding an organisation employing competition terms and conditions that strip creators of many of their rights. Utterly amazing!

Subsequent to our notification letter the British Council engaged in discussion with Pro-Imaging. They said that they "will certainly take advantage of Pro-Imaging's advice when designing competitions in future", and went on to say that for this competition they "will not use the photos longer than for two years" and "discuss further details of cooperation with the final winners". Pro-Imaging welcome these statements from the British Council, but we note too that the rules of this competition as published remain unchanged, and that these statements, while encouraging, are not clear enough to fully comply with our Bill of Rights.

###

Organisations - British Council

Judges - Not named.

Contact - Send enquiries and views about this contest to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

© 2008 Pro-Imaging; Last updated on 12 June 2008

The above text may be reproduced providing the Pro-Imaging copyright notice is displayed with a link to the Pro-Imaging website.

Text reproduced above in quotes has been extracted from the competition website for the purposes of review in this report.

NB. If the competition rules are changed after updated date shown above it is the competition organisers responsibility to notify Pro-Imaging of changes made.