ALWAYS read the fine print
Olivier Glod
Being the nice guy that he is, Patrick let me know about the competition.
For those of you who don’t speak French: this is about sending in landscape shots from Luxembourg. The selected winners will not only receive a prize, but their images will also be featured on the company’s 2014 calendar. The profits from the sale of this calendar will be donated to Caritas and the Red Cross.
So far, so good. I selected a photo, filled out the form and was just moments away from starting the upload. All I had left to do was to “accept the rules of the competition”. Usually I just check these boxes without thinking twice (just as an example: who in their right mind goes through the entire iTunes Terms And Conditions ?), but not this time. I don’t know why, but something inside me compelled me to have a wee look at the terms before agreeing to them.
While page 1 is entirely fine, page 2 starts off with a bang, rather boldly stating “Cession des droits d’auteurs sur la photographie” (surrender of the image’s copyright). It all goes downhill from that point on: Every contestant (whether they be selected as a winner or not!) surrenders ALL rights related to the entered photo to Petro-Center, which in turn will be able to use any of those pictures to illustrate their future national and international marketing campaigns no matter which support they should choose (internet, multimedia animation, exhibition, paper, etc.). To drive the point home, article 11 on page 3 once again states that you agree to your image being used by Petro-Center without any compensation whatsoever.
For those interested, here’s a copy of the whole text translated by Google Translate, and here’s a link to download the original PDF, should it have been taken down in the meantime.
I will not continue with this rant, but needless to say that I do not agree with this practice and would like to offer one final word of advice:
ALWAYS read the fine print!