Pro-Imaging

Bill of Rights Condition 2

Sponsors Free Usage to Promote Contest must be Time Limited

One of the prime motivating factors in developing The Bill of Rights for photo competitions was to set out guidelines, which if followed by contest organisers and sponsors, would ensure that commercial image libraries could not be built by running photographic competitions.

It is well known that the aim of many competitions is to build image libraries at little cost, often such contests make it clear by the rules they publish what they are doing, the sort of rule that goes like this -

The language will vary of course from contest to contest but essentially they are claiming the rights to use your images for ever and profit from them to the maximum extent possible - and you will never see a penny. Building vast image libraries from image submissions to contests is hugely damaging to the interests of all photographers every where, amateur and professional.

With vast image libraries that can be freely used who needs photographers?

One of the provisions in The Bill of Rights to combat this behaviour is to set a time limit on free usage to promote the contest. Note that images used by the sponsor to promote the competition can only be used for 5 years, the 5 years starting from date on which the contest winners are announced for the specific contest the images were submitted to.

At the end of that period a sponsor complying with The Bill of Rights no longer has any right to use an image submitted to that contest, and should they wish to do so the organiser would need to agree a commercial usage license with the photographer concerned.

We cannot recommend any photographic competition which fails this test.