Competitions and your rights

It's an ever increasing problem: companies running photo competitions that then demand you hand over your rights to the images. Imagine my surprise when I found an exception.

The Daily Telegraph in the UK runs a couple of travel photo competitions - usual stuff: post your best travel shots and win a prize. Interestingly, however, is the honouring of the photographers' copyright. The rules state that the entrant agrees to a limited release for the purposes of the competition, for a limited time period. Pretty much the minimum you'd have to do.

I thought I'd see if this attitude spanned across newspapers. Unfortunately not.

I checked out the other UK quality papers: The Times, Guardian and Independent. The last doesn't seem to do photo comps. As for The Times and Guardian, pretty much the usual rights grab on effectively the same sort of competition as the DT. In both cases they claim full, royalty free rights across their entire publishing groups in perpetuity.

Makes me wonder how they treat the paid photographers. If the amateur competitions are a measure of the way they treat the pros, there's only one publication in this group I'd want to work for.