“Quality journalism is of vital importance to healthy democracies – and cartoonists play a crucial role in this system of checks and balances” according to European Press Prize in its web page promoting their European Cartoon Award, which they say aims “to award courage and quality in the field of cartooning”.
They note that cartoon[ist]s are feeling the strain of the shrinking space for freedom of expression. But if the promoters want to reward hard-pressed cartoonists they have a funny way of doing it. Their terms and conditions require all entrants to irrevocably surrender all their copyright without time or geographical limits, in any and all media (“now or hereafter known”!) without remuneration. And not content with expropriating everyone’s intellectual property rights, the promoters also claim the right to assign (i.e. flog off) entrant’s copyright to third parties.
This is pretty outrageous and I have written to them complaining about their terms and conditions in the hope that they will remove the bits claiming our work as their property — because their demands are, after all, not just unreasonable but actually unnecessary unless the scheme is just a big fraud.
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