Guardian Backs Down Over Photographer Copyright

Photographers own copyright to their images, but a lot of heavyweight organisations are sneakily putting small print into their Competition Terms & Conditions which steal copyright from the rightful owner.

The Guardian's Weekend Magazine runs a weekly photography competition and until today entrants signed away their copyright when they entered the competition. In fact, since this issue was raised just one week ago, the Guardian have had to rewrite their Terms & Conditions 4 times to satisfy the NUJ and Canon (the official sponsor of the competition)

The Guardian newspaper can now only use those images submitted to their competition to market and publicise the competition itself. The original contract allowed the newspaper to use the images or even to resell them, forever, sparking fears that they were amassing a large and completely free royalty free picture library by stealth.

So if you are entering a photography competition, check out the small print - are you prepared to give away all rights on your images?

With Fotolia, although the images are royalty free stock photos, the photographer retains the copyright of their images. What is sold to the customer is a license to use the images only in the ways set out in the agreed royalty free license.

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