As a National Trust member in Northern Ireland I recently received some literature about the pictureyourself.org.uk website.
Basically, it is a competition where you take photographs of yourself on National Trust property or of National Trust property and upload them to the competition website www.pictureyourself.org.uk.
What a great idea I thought, so off I went to the website and as I went to register I clicked on the terms and conditions and couldn’t believe what I was reading.
Here are the terms and conditions of entry taken from https://pictureyourself.org.uk/terms.php
Your contributions
If you submit any material to us, you agree to grant The National Trust a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use your contribution in all media. This includes the right to copy, edit, publish, grant sub-licences and exercise all other copyright and publicity rights over the material. If you do not want to grant these rights, please do not submit your contribution to us.
You warrant that the materials you submit are original and that you have the right to grant the above licence. You waive all moral rights in the materials for the purposes above.
By submitting your contribution you acknowledge and confirm that all models used in your contribution have provided consent to have their images published on the www.nationaltrust.org.uk/pictureyourself website and to be used in further publications both online and offline in printed material.
By submitting my image I would give the NT full copyright and all rights relating to the photograph. This means that the NT could do what ever they wanted to do with the image. They could sell images onto a third party for hundreds or even thousands of pounds and I wouldn’t get a penny from it.
No professional photographer would ever sign away the copyright of their photograph. So why should the National Trust impose such conditions on the general public who haven’t got a clue about what the above extract means.
Imagine if somebody took a photograph of a complete stranger say a man holding hands with his mistress on a romantic getaway, (his wife thinks he is away on business), at a NT property and submitted it without understanding what “consent of model” means (after all model consent and model releases are terminology normally associated with professional photographers) and then suddenly that photograph appears in numerous magazines and journals. I wonder what comeback that complete stranger would have, after all the photograph was taken on private property and published without his consent - did he sign a model release form?
It would seem that the national trust may have been inspired by the previous owners of the domain name (http://www.windmillhillcityfarm.org.uk/projects.pictureyourself/pictureyourself.about.htm) - at least the previous owners recognised that the copyright stayed with the person who took the photograph.
One has to ask why do the NT need to have such terms and conditions. Their wording implies that the NT Trust want complete ownership of the images so they can do what they want with them without having to consider the person who took the image.
If you want to take a photograph on National Trust Property for commercial purposes, you have to PAY for every hour you are on their land, sign a contract and give them a percentage of any money you make from that photograph.
On the other hand, they are quite happy to take photographs from unsuspecting members of the public and strip away any rights the person who took the photograph normally has.
Here is the link to an article about the competition at the website of the PR company employed by the NT - http://www.bluecubeinteractive.com/work/picture-yourself-in-northern-ireland/
Also this is the link to the website of the professional photographer who is on the judging panel - it discusses what the different types of license they offer and what they mean: http://www.scenicireland.com/licence_info/
Something for you to think about, why were these onerous conditions buried in the middle of a number of paragraphs of terms relating to the use of the website. Why didn’t they get a page all of there own?
Interestingly ScenicIreland has many many images of National Trust properties on it as well, just do a search for Castle Ward and over 400 images are returned.
Finally I just love this quote from Maurica Lavery who is Marketing and Communications Manager with The National Trustthe - see the judges page (https://pictureyourself.org.uk/judges.php)
“I am really excited by the potential for great images that this competition will bring. Join in.”"