All of us are used to paying a small price for entry to competitions. Creatives too are unsurprised when asked to crack open their wallet or volunteer their sliver of plastic so they can push their wares before a panel of judges; whether it’s for photography, art, film, poetry or screenplay contests. However, writers submitting their work to a television station’s story-writing competition over the last few months would have been dismayed at the extremity of the entry fee it demanded.
The competition, Once Upon a Bedtime, was launched by Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr channel at the end of August, and was a search for the best new bedtime stories, open to established and aspiring writers. The three prize winning entries would have their story turned into an animated piece to be screened on Nick Jr, and the overall winner would receive a creative writing weekend break plus book vouchers. Pretty good prizes.
The devil in the detail however was in the competition rules, unmasked in the Shooting People website’s daily Screenwriter’s Network Issue 43 of 13th December. Writer and director Richard Simpson highlighted the IP issue in his posting on the bulletin; pointing out the offending clauses:
“20. Entrants agree that the Promoter” (Nick Jr) “may use any ideas, concepts or materials in whole or in part contained in the entrant’s entry and that the entry or any part will not infringe any trademark, copyright or otherwise violate anyone’s moral rights of privacy or publicity or otherwise be unlawful.
21. Entrants agree to waive any moral rights they may have in their entry.
22. Entrants further agree that all rights, titles and interests in all material submitted to the Promoter as part of the entry to this competition including without limitation all artistic, literary and dramatic rights, are assigned with full title guarantee to the Promoter and that the entry, including the bedtime story, shall belong to the Promoter.”
What these clauses meant was that, in effect, all writers submitting work to the competition would be agreeing to surrender all ownership and rights to their work. By waiving moral rights too (clause 21), they would also relinquish any entitlement to be known as the author of the work – they wouldn’t even get a credit. And clearly these clauses would be effective and binding whether entrants won or not.
Simpson considered the terms despicable. One would-be competition entrant went even further.
“The rules and regulations for your competition are completely monstrous! You should feel ashamed!” said Tally in their clearly very angry posting of 19th November; publicly giving their reasons for refusing to submit their work on the Nick Jr Bedtime story forum. “…The author loses any copyright over their work, or any part of it,” she continued, “you run the competition to find new stories and ideas for Nick Jr, not to promote new authors.”
Nick Jr representative nicktvant – who also posted the original competition announcement on the forum back in August – responded the following day, trying to pour oil on the troubled water.
“While our legal terms and conditions do necessarily have to be quite strict,” his reply went, “it’s not our intention to in any way “steal” your stories or your ideas, and we certainly would not behave dishonourably towards anyone who had entered our competition.
“The competition is to give the author of a story the chance to have their story made into a short cartoon on Nick Jr. – obviously we would like to be able to show the winning cartoon for a little while and that is why the terms and conditions require that we have the rights to do so.
“…Obviously the terms and conditions are the full legal statement of how things are, but I can only re-iterate that we would not behave in an underhand fashion towards any entrant.”
Perhaps such a statement is acceptable to the winner and runners-up (with whom Nick Jr would have had to agree terms of rights sale in order to produce the animation anyway, so giving the reason for wanting to show the cartoon for a little while is no justification). But it’s hardly an adequate explanation to the losing writers who worked long and hard on their stories, only to have lost their intellectual property and any other opportunity to make a sale from them. Nor does it explain why Nick Jr needs to obtain or retain ownership of the IP it has received and – in its judges’ eyes – deemed so inferior as not worth producing. Why hang onto it then?
While Nick Jr may not be stealing writers’ work as such (they are being surrendered under agreement after all), despite its statement such clauses nonetheless make its behaviour appear both underhanded and dishonourable. This writer has seen competition clauses in screenwriting circles that effectively state the entrant accepts the promoter may have similar projects in development already, and waives any opportunity to sue if said projects just happen to appear in cinemas or on TV after the competition (a get-out-of-jail-free card I don’t like). Nick Jr’s terms however reach a new low. Tally’s suspicions are therefore hardly surprising; the competition appears to be an excellent tool for mass appropriation of IP rights by stealth, and at very little cost to Nick Jr. What better way to trawl for original and potentially lucrative material, while avoiding all that annoying faffing about having to negotiate the sale with the rights holders for a reasonable fee. Do writers like Simpson and Tally have a right to be concerned? Most definitely.
This matter highlights just how vulnerable IP holders can be, even in the competitive world where their rights would appear safer. Nick Jr should be asked to justify their reasoning. After all, in the media world if a writer submits work to a production company, the price of submission may just be a rejection, but certainly not the surrendering of their copyright ownership. What therefore makes the competition environment any different?
Clearly there should be regulation in place – or at least industry guidance – to stop production companies and networks using such methods to obtain rights ownership without adequate recompense to writers, who could potentially lose out on their just reward for creating the next Teletubbies, Fireman Sam or Bob the Builder.
Will Nick Jr give a better account of itself? One can only hope. It might be able to get away with inadequate explanations for its actions to posters like Tally, but Richard Simpson will be harder to ignore. He also happens to be on the Kids Committee of the Writers Guild of Great Britain. And the WGGB will be an organisation requiring some stunning fast talking to satisfy.
© 2006 Julian Boote All rights reserved.
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January 24, 2007 at 8:41 pm |
[...] Jr Copyright Appropriation Competition – Update Since posting my Warning! Entering this competition will cost you your rights article (14th December 2006) about Nick Jr’s Once Upon a Bedtime contest, I’ve since been [...]