Well, the perpetual rights to your writing. But your writing's pretty much as close to your soul as you can get, right?
Check out the link to the Huff Post's contest - it has some of the most brutal rights restrictions in it I've seen in writing contracts. Worldwide and perpetual rights to use and modify your work without any limitations, whether or not you win the competition.
One clause states:
"Submission of an Initial Entry grants Sponsors and their agents the unconditional, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to publish, use, adapt, edit and/or modify such Entry in any way, in any and all media, without limitation, and without consideration to the entrant, whether or not such Entry is selected as a winning Entry."
And it doesn't look like people are just willing to bend over and take it, either, from the outrage I can see in the comments.
Yikes!
I think it's a good thing people are speaking up in the comments because a lot of new kids may not even realize how awful those terms are.
I imagine with a name like the Huff Post dangling golden tickets out there, consideration for the terms and conditions would have been an afterthought.
Those terms terms are terrifying, given I finished a semi-memoir myself.
Maybe it would be disqualified, though by the sounds of things It sounds like they would use it even if your disqualified.
And I highly doubt THP would do this, but the terms would allow them to insert something as ridiculous as say, a vampire/human hybrid pregancy into your story.
I can actually visualize how this went down, given my experience in the business world.
Panicked Marketing Manager runs to legal department: "We've got this competition that has to go live in an hour! We need terms and conditions! So that we can do stuff with their stories! We need to be able to use their stories and you know, do stuf!!!"
Lawyer: "How long have you known about this?"
Marketing: "Oh, three months or so!"
Frustrated lawyer who is about to go into a three hour meeting has five minutes to throw something haphazardly together and give it to marketing, who will blame them if they give nothing, or blame them if they give them something. It's going to go badly either way.
Now that sounds like a good story, Vampire Lawyers from Huffpost hell.
I'm going to read the comments.
