Since posting my Warning! Entering this competition will cost you your rights article (14th December 2006) about Nick Jr’s Once Upon a Bedtime contest, I’ve since been emailed by a writer who entered it and learned too late Nick Jr had taken his copyright.
Having heard about the competition from his wife, Paul Rowlinson had submitted his story Sammy the Spanner – inspired by a bedtime story he’d told his baby son – just before the closing date in November. Keen to return to the novel he’d been writing as part of the annual NaNoWriMo novel writing challenge, Paul admits, “Thoughts of reading the terms and conditions before submitting were pretty low down on my list.”
It was only when he went back into the Nick Jr site to look for details about the date winners would be notified that he discovered the competition’s clauses that had effectively stripped him of ownership of his own story, transferring it to Nick Jr.
Not content to shrug his shoulders and let it go however, Rowlinson didn’t leave it there. Instead of going the route of Tally, another competition entrant who publicly protested about this situation on the Nick Jr website forum, Rowlinson decided to write to the TV station about his story.
He wrote me, “I basically said the following: ‘Surely this only applies to the winners and not ALL entrants? It seems to me that if you haven’t thought my work appropriate for yourselves then I’m at liberty to use it elsewhere?’”
It’s an entirely reasonable question and one I asked in my previous article. After all, Nick Jr has not offered a convincing argument for stripping the losing entrants of ownership of their stories; many of them in all likelihood written by parents for their own children. Apart from it being a canny if dishonourable tactic to appropriate en-masse and by stealth the IP rights of a multitude of creatives, what other purpose do these competition clauses serve?
Well, to make a rod for Nick Jr’s own back perhaps. Consider this; how can Nick Jr police their new assets? Is it expecting these writers to stop telling their children these stories they’ve written and obediently put them in drawers never to be read again? That won’t happen. Will Nick Jr expect every writer to have read the terms of the competition? That’s highly unlikely judging from Rowlinson’s experience, which means many losing entrants could – and likely will – submit their work to other competitions and to publishers, blissfully ignorant they are infringing someone’s copyright they think is still theirs. In that event, would Nick Jr want the adverse publicity of taking a one-time competition entrant to court over a story they wrote for their own child?
It is better that all the losers retain ownership of their submissions.
Rowlinson’s action is a pro-active response, and more entrants should take similar action and ask Nick Jr for their rights back. In market research terms the opinions of 1 person can represent those of a thousand. If you extrapolate that thinking therefore to the entrants to Nick Jr’s competition, the more writers who contact Nick asking for their rights back, or who contact the Writers Guild of Great Britain to petition Nick Jr about this issue, the harder it will be for Nick Jr to ignore this issue. In fact, it would soon realise taking this path was very ill-judged indeed.
To date, there have been no posted announcements from Nick Jr on their site; the competition page remains the same as when it closed. Rowlinson hasn’t yet received an answer to his letter either. It is however the start of the year. Let’s hope Nick Jr take him seriously, and are reasonable with his request.
Did you submit your story to Nick Jr? Have you tried to contact them? If so, let me know what happened at: info@dulynoted.co.uk.
© 2007 Julian Boote All rights reserved.
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Film | john 26 October, 2010 | 
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