Boycotting F&W Art competitions

A fellow artist recently pointed out to me that F&W have a clause in their competition contracts that makes an artist give rights to F&W to do whatever they want with your artwork images!  I have written them a letter and encourage other artists to do the same asking them to let us keep our rights and change the wording on their contract!  Below is my letter.

F&W runs the following art publications: "The Artist Magazine", "Southwest Art", "The Pastel Journal" and "Watercolor Artist".  ALL of these magazines hold contests and all of them make you sign this same contract giving up your rights!


Dear F&W-

I was recently going to enter two of your contests (The Artist Magazine and Strokes of Genius 3) with my artwork and just as I am getting ready to hit submit I scroll through your contract and see the line at the end that reads "I hereby grant the Sponsoring Organization the perpetual, non-exclusive, world-wide right to publish, republish and repurpose my artwork in both print and digital formats, including, but not limited to books, promotion materials, websites, databases and as part of downloadable digital products." perpetual, non-exclusive, world-wide right ... to you! Where are the artists rights? So you can sell t-shirts, mugs, prints of MY artwork if you should want to? I think not!! I urge you to strongly consider rewording this clause to grant you the rights to publish the work and use it on web sites and for advertising, but please remove the extreme wording that makes me give away all of my rights!!

I encourage you to reword it to include terms similar to those found on the Best Of Artists competition which reads "All participating artists retain full copyrights of their images. By submitting your images and entry form you grant Kennedy Promotions LLC the right to publish images of your artwork in print within the Best Of Books and on the Internet within BOAA and the Visual Art Guide for the purposes of promoting your artwork and will not hold Kennedy Promotions liable for any infringement of your copyright." This is a nice clean clause that I would be happy to agree to, but until the wording on your entry forms is changed and does not grant "perpetual, non-exclusive, world-wide right " to F&W I will never enter another one of your contests. And maybe I am just one artist (though you would have been getting over $100 on my entries alone), however I will be encouraging other artists (of which I know MANY) to NOT enter your contests as well until this has changed.

There is no need for the wording that you have in your contract if your intentions are only to use the images for publication, advertising and web sites. Please change them so that I can feel comfortable entering your contests again.

Regards-

Cathy Sheeter
www.aphelionart.com