Rights Grab!

Rights Grab!

Photographers are always complaining about the double whammy of teams, leagues, and publications trying to grab rights with the number of photographers who are willing to give away their rights because they wrongly think it will help to get them into the business.

Photography is not the only industry with this problem. Joseph Jaffe is boycotting Hilton Hotels. No, it is not over pictures of some the heirs. It is over Hilton's rights grab. Hilton is undergoing a $45 million creative/media review. They are trying to require that all agencies participating sign away ownership of pitch materials (“all tangible expressions”) for any of the IP developed. This means that an agency could bid on the job, lose, and still see its ideas in future Hilton advertisements with no compensation.

Jaffe does not mince words and although I agree with his sentiments, I'll refer you to his site for language that describes this. What Hilton is doing is every bit as despicable as those fake photography contests that require you to give up your rights to every picture entered.

I too would like to compliment BBDO and Goodby for refusing to participate. While it is too much to hope that everyone will turn Hilton down, one can hope that the only ones that are dumb enough to participate have work that is so bad that it ruins the Hilton brand and costs them 5x as much to repair the mistakes than it would have cost to do the right thing in the first place.