Pro-Imaging

2008 11 30 International Wild Bird Photographer Awards

International Wild Bird Photographer Awards ends 30 November 2008

Click the above title to see the contest rules page.

This competition has been notified to Pro-Imaging by our contributors because it fails to comply with the Bill of Rights. Pro-Imaging have verified that the rules do not fully comply with the Bill of Rights and to illustrate this extracts from this competitions rules are listed below. This report has been made available to the organiser.

If you are a competition organiser and want to understand why your competition appears here please note the following bullet points. Briefly, competitions which pass the Bill of Rights do not -

claim copyright
seek waiving of moral rights
seek usage rights other than for solely and exclusively promoting the contest. Note that a book, posters, cards, or a calendar are seen as legitimate ways of promoting the contest and defraying costs.
seek free usage rights in excess of 5 years
use the images commercially without the photographers agreement, and such commercial usage is to be rights managed and limited to 5 years.
make it a condition of winning that an entrant must sign a commercial usage agreement.
fail to publish all documents on the competition website that an entrant may have to sign
fail to name the judges for this or last year's competition
fail to explicitly state all the organisations who will acquire rights to the images
set a closing date more than 18 months after the contest launch date
fail to make clear statements of rights claimed and how images are used.

This competition has failed on one or more of the above. Click on any of the highlighted links in the above bullet points for further information, and of course comprehensive detail on all these points is given in the Bill of Rights.

The Rules of this Contest

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

"■ The organisers and sponsors reserve the right to free reproduction and exhibition in all media of prize-winning or commended entries, but only in connection with this competition and publicity for it.
■ The organisers reserve the worldwide, royalty-free right and licence for the full period of copyright to publish winning and commended images in a book or magazine, and at their discretion will pay reproduction fees to photographers."

Pro-Imaging Comment - This contest is claiming rights for the organisers and sponsors to use all images entered for the full period of copyright and fails the Bill of Rights for that reason. Payment of reproduction fees should not be at the organisers discretion, they should be automatic and rights managed. Usage is not stated to be solely and exclusively to promote the contest, instead it says usage is in connection with the competition, this is imprecise and would permit other parallel uses. The rules fail to state that entrants will be credited when their image is published.

Organisations - Bauer Media, Bird Watching Magazine, International Wild Bird Photographer Awards, Canon, Sony, Nikon, Swarovski, Leica, Giotto, Opticron, Wildlife Watching Supplies, KATA, Lowepro, Manfrotto, Bushnell, Warehouse Express

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

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. If Pro-Imaging is notified of rule changes by the organiser the competition rules will be reviewed again for compliance with the Bill of Rights. The competition will be moved to the Rights On List when the rules comply with the Bill of Rights.

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The Rules of this Contest