Some months ago I became aware of the terms of many of the photo contests on the web and in magazines – and since that time I haven’t seen more than a couple that I would even consider entering given their effect on the value of my work. (The Photo Attorney writes about one today and has written about others in the past.)

If you enter a contest it seems reasonable to assume that the company running the contest would acquire some limited licensing rights to use the winning photograph in ways logically connected to the contest and to their company in return for selecting the photograph and providing the winner some valuable prizes and publicity. For example, if a magazine has a photography contest it seems reasonable to expect that they should be able to publish the photograph in the magazine in an article announcing the winners, or perhaps even use it as a cover illustration with full credit to the photographer and with a clear connection to the contest. There should be time limits and the license should not extend much beyond those circumstances, though the terms may well spell out the ways in which the company might negotiate additional uses in the future.

However, that is not how most of these contests work. When you read the contest terms you will almost always discover some very serious issues:

• Rather than limiting their license as to time and to types of usage logically related to the contest, most terms that I have seen acquire extensive, virtually unlimited rights to the photographer’s work. Most are written so broadly as to acquire the right to do essentially anything with the photograph, for any period of time, in any medium – and completely without compensation to the photographer and in most cases without credit to the phtographer.
• In most cases the license extends not only to the entity conducting the contest but to a host of business partners and others that appears to be virtually unlimited. For example, the way many contest terms are written it would be entirely legal for the printing company that prints the magazine to use the entrant’s photograph in unrelated publications with entirely different clients – again without any compensation or even credit to the photographer.
• Most onerous of all, in virtually even contest I’ve seen these terms are not limited to the contest winners. Instead, the conditions apply to every contest entry! That’s right – if you enter the contest but do not win you still will have provided a free, eternal, unlimited license to the company running the contest and to a wide range of others who might do business with those running the contest. Consider that those operating the contests acquire unlimited usage rights to  hundreds or thousands of photographs submitted for consideration. This is why the term intellectual property rights grab is often used to describe the contests.

When I’ve contacted entities running contest with such terms I have gotten a variety of responses. The response that I consider to be most disingenuous – and downright dangerous – goes something like this: “Yes, that’s what the legal department made us do, but we would never treat a contest entrant that way. You can trust us.” At this point the red flag should go up and alarm bells should ring. If they really don’t intend to grab these rights, why write contest terms that allow them to do so? Why not write the contest rules in such a way that they reflect their actual intent?

Read the contest terms very carefully before you enter any photography contest. While the lure of a prize and a bit of recognition may entice you, keep in mind that few actually win, that the judging can be quite arbitrary, and whether or not you win you will have given away rights to your work.