"By entering, you further agree to waive all rights of attribution and
integrity if your Entry is used by Sponsor or anyone Sponsor authorizes,
and to waive any moral rights in the Entry."
I've been seeing that sentence in a lot of contest calls of late especially those issued by high profile magazines and companies. I didn't get why you have to waive your moral rights until I looked up the definition of moral in the dictionary -"of or relating to principles of right or wrong". So even though they're wrong to use your contest submission without paying or crediting you (even if you don't win the contest), you have to give up the right to tell them they're wrong. Not very nice and decidedly immoral. One of the big reasons why I don't enter contests. Watch your backs out there, my friends.
2 comments:
Moral rights is a legal term of art. I don't have a Black's Law Dictionary anymore, so we'll have to hope the folks at Nolo got this definition right:
Moral Rights
Certain rights of authors, recognized primarily in European countries, beyond those traditionally granted under copyright law. Moral rights include the right to proclaim authorship of a work, disclaim authorship of a work, and object to any modification or use of the work that would be injurious to the author's reputation.
Yep, that's pretty much what I thought, Barb. They're basically stealing your work and by entering their contest you're saying that's okay. Not nice at all.
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