Are competitions just a way for corporations to get free images?

May 14, 2013 • Leave a Comment

With the move to the new host, I have lost many of the old blog posts (although the text are archived here, photos might be missing).

This is a re-jig of a post I wrote back in 2009

The terms and conditions of many photographic competition's run by corporations have terms like this (these were lifted from a travel company's competition):

All entries must be photographs taken and owned by you.
By submitting your photographs to **** , you are agreeing for us to publish your photographs at any time, in any publication or on-line, and in any capacity we choose.
By entering your photographs into this competition, you are then agreeing to transfer the copyright of such images to ****
**** reserves the right to modify any photographs submitted, such as amending colours, cropping or re-sizing.
The photographs should be limited to destinations visited by **** , or of one of our ships.
**** reserves the right to cancel the competition at any stage.
Entrants should ensure that, where relevant, they obtain consent for the photograph to be used from any people featured.

When you consider that they were offering (and most competitions offer) lower cost cameras or kit, it is such a cheap way for them to harvest marketing images for adverts, brochures, leaflets etc. I do not think there is any way to take it other than "we want lots of free images of our ships which we will probably using in marketing saving us thousands of pounds in photographer fees over the next few years".

Luckily the artists-bill-of-rights run a whitelist / blacklist listing those competitions with both fair and unfair rights helping you choose wether you should enter a competition.

Take a look at the list and above all, before you enter ANY photographic competition, understand the terms of entry.

Keywords: Photographs, Photography, artists bills of rights, competition, competitions, photographer, professional photographer

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