While perusing the online Wall Street Journal, I came across a top story in the small business section: “Online Video Contest Gets People Talking” by Simona Covel. It relates the marketing success of Interwrite Learning, a maker of classroom technology tools, at using an online contest.
Interwrite invited teachers and students to send in videos of themselves performing their favorite songs, rewritten with new lyrics expressing the importance of technology in their classrooms. As a result of the contest, Interwrite received more than 200 videos which it posted online for comment, collected 27,000 leads, and increased its website traffic from 7,000 hits a month to 7,000 hits per week during the six weeks of the contest.
Publication and use of user-generated-content exposes a company to potential copyright, trademark, privacy and similar claims if contestants’ videos include music, images, faces of real people, etc. that they don’t have permission to use.
Here are a few techniques that companies holding contests can use to minimize some of the risks associated with user-generated content:
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Take advantage of the insulation offered by Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) by complying with the terms for its safe-harbors. However, note that reliance on DMCA safe-harbors is not full-proof as illustrated by Viacom’s pending $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube.
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Educate contest participants on proper rights clearance and have them warrant through your website’s terms of use or your contest rules that they are authorized to use all materials included in their contest submissions. Again, not a full-proof method.
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If appropriate for your contest focus, consider offering your contestants source materials that you have pre-cleared. For example, for the Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge, AtomFilms.com worked with LucasFilms to offer hundreds of scenes and sounds from the six Star Wars films pre-cleared for use in contestants submissions.
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