Whenever I see a photographic competition, I always read the rules/terms and conditions very carefully, as there are some very sharp operators out there.

The latest competition to catch my eye was in the June edition of the English Heritage magazine "Heritage Today" The prize is quite good - an Olympus E400 kit. But here's the catch, they are stipulating that copyright of ALL entries becomes the property of English Heritage.

This is just outrageous.

If anyone wants to follow me and complain about such disgraceful terms and conditions, please email: heritagetoday@sevensquared.co.uk and cc to: members@english-heritage.org.uk.

Needless to say, I will not be entering the competition!

You do have to be very careful with these competitions. I have seen short story competitions where in the small print they have said the same thing, that once you submit your story it becomes the magazines copyright, which is disgraceful.

Are they serious? That ALL entries become theirs? They've got a lot of nerve.

Kingfisher

That's a disgrace! I wonder how much money the competition will make from selling all their entries. A lot more than the prize is worth that's for sure.

Here is the reply I received to my email complaining about the termas & conditions:

I am sorry that you are unhappy about our request for the copyright for images entered into our competition.

I appreciate that some photographers do not wish to hand over copyright of their work, but this caveat was to cover our reproducing the pictures for the purposes of the competition in the magazine - and possibly online - and the fact that we are not able to send them back. It is part of our standard terms and conditions for any photographer who wishes to work for English Heritage.

I can understand why this request might seem heavy-handed, but in an organisation that deals with many thousands of images every year, we need to ensure that we are acting within the law in reproducing images. I am sure you will appreciate that to have differing agreements with different photographers would be time consuming and problematical in dealing with copyright issues. However, should we run more competitions I will certainly review the Terms & Conditions in light of your comments.

I am currently thinking up a suitable reply. I don't think a raspberry is quite the right thing!

I think something along the lines of:

If you aren't going to send the images back, and you only print a few, why would you seize the copyright for EVERY image sent to you? Surely it would be just as much trouble copyrighting EVERY image.

I would also imagine that professional photographers ALREADY have different agreements than those of us who are simply 'amateurs'.

Kingfisher

Yes surely they could just copyright the few that they are going to print, rather than every single image.

I recently entered a short story competition with Woman & Home magazine. It was linked in with the Costa Coffee awards. They keep copyright of the winning and the first nine runners up!! Really disgraceful. I imagine that is to ensure them of nearly the whole next years short stories for their monthly magazine!