Did I break the company photo contest?

[sm4him]

Personally, if I had a winning photo, I'd be upset at being hung on a wall. But that's me.

Well, I know I've been hung out to dry at work before, and that didn't even require winning a photo contest!

 

[sm4him]

Personally, if I had a winning photo, I'd be upset at being hung on a wall. But that's me.

The grammar contest isn't until next month.

Au contraire, mon ami: For some of us, the grammar contest NEVER ends…

 

[waday]

If this were some little mom-and-pop local business, with 8 employees, then yeah, I'd say you pooped on their partay.

But this sounds like a BIG company; a HUGE company overall, but even for just your office, it's BIG. If they put something like this out there without even considering something like copyright, then I'd say they deserved to have it crumble around them with your one little question: Who gets the copyright?

Hey, at least you didn't wait until after you'd entered and won, and then they slap your winning image on something that makes them a mint and you come along for your share, because the contest never mentioned giving away copyright.

This is easily fixed, if they really WANT to run the contest. All they gotta do is actually have some written rules about how it works. I don't really think that's too much to ask.

It's very true.. Some of our proposals can be big, and I wouldn't see ANY change in my salary. Haha. The projects I typically work on range from $25K to well over $200K, depending on the client. The largest I've seen was in the millions. Granted, these weren't won with photographs.

But it still bugged me that they didn't have any terms or conditions of the 'contest', since a normal contract we make our client sign is around 20-30 pages...

 

[waday]

There are two effects of a note like this.
One, you might get the contest started and two, you will establish that you are a thoughtful person who cares about his own efforts but who has the company's interest in mind and is willing to contribute to its success.

Yes. This is very wise!

 

[AlanKlein]

"They also said the photos could very well be used for proposals (which I read to mean commercial purposes)."

What kind of proposals would use amateur photos from a work place contest that has many different categories? Why would they only have a small group of 350 people submit photos in a company of over 50,000 to be used in proposals?

 

[waday]

"They also said the photos could very well be used for proposals (which I read to mean commercial purposes)."

What kind of proposals would use amateur photos from a work place contest that has many different categories? Why would they only have a small group of 350 people submit photos in a company of over 50,000 to be used in proposals?

Without getting into the details, imagine each office is on its own. The offices will collaborate when experience from another office is required to win a project.

AFAIK, there is no company-wide photo database of images. Despite lots of people wanting one.

When people send emails to the entire company, there is major backlash. It's happened more than once.

 

[Overread]

Chances are some managers decided this was a neat idea, considering how good most people are with a camera they probably hoped they'd get one or two good shots and the rest would be mostly team-building. Heck chances are they might not even have been image harvesting at all (hey lets have a little photo competition!) and comments to that effect were more a byproduct.

However your question raised the concern of copyright and chances are they either got scared off then or they went to legal and legal said "hey this is neat - but its going to cost £Xxxx for us to sort out a formal contract for this affair so that its all legal.
Or someone higher up said "Oh heck we won't profit from this and if we use any of those photos we might lose our regular photographer"

That its been dropped fast suggests the legal aspects and image harvesting aspects came into trouble..

 

[Josh66]

It sounds to me like you asked a question that they hadn't even considered yet, which in itself is kind of odd. Usually, the people who set up company photo contests have some interest in photography, and people like that should have thought to ask that question...

We had a bi-monthly photo contest at my last job, and they were clear about who owns what and what the company can do with the photos from the beginning. (Basically, all that the company could do was hang them in the lobby and put them on the photo club website.)

 

[The_Traveler]

If I had my druthers, I surely would opt for being widely known as hung rather than hanged.

 

[limr]

If I had my druthers, I surely would opt for being widely known as hung rather than hanged.

Ah, wisdom comes at a price.

 

[BillM]

Said the man who was famous for "giving it away"

 

[bratkinson]

For the first time, I submitted photos for my employers' calendar that has a large distribution. About a year ago, I took a couple of shots while on my break, but on company property and contacted their legal people and they were 'unclear' about ownership rights, but did indicate that photos showing specific customer equipment on the property cannot be distributed without written permission of the equipment owner(s).

It'll be interesting if 'they' put two and two together and think I may raise the ownership issue if they publish one of my 5 submitted shots (their max submission limit). They may also decide against my work for that very reason.