Pro-Imaging

Bill of Rights Condition 3

All Commercial Usage is Rights Managed & Time Limited

Some competitions organisers will approach entrants to competitions for the rights to use the entrants submission commercially to advertise a product or to promote a company for example. In such cases the Bill of Rights requires organisers to offer the entrant a rights managed license with a non exclusive rights managed usage term not exceeding 5 years.

The reason for time limiting is the usual one, to make it impossible to build free libraries with unlimited usage rights from images submitted to competitions. Building free libraries from the submissions to photographic competitions is hugely damaging to photographers everywhere, both professional and amateur.

The Bill of Rights was developed as a way of analysing competition rules and in doing so split contests into two groups, those that respect photographers rights and those that don't.

Contests which fail this rule cannot be recommended.