We’ve been recently asked about the Promotional Use clause in the rules. So, let’s just go through it right quick:

Promotional Use:

The Sponsor agrees that Entrants shall retain the copyright to their works, except to the extent that the Entrants have voluntarily entered into a written contractual arrangement with the Sponsor.

By agreeing to participate in the Contest, you grant the Sponsor a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use your submission — in its entirety, in part, or as part of one or more collective works — in connection with the promotion of the Contest or Sponsor. This includes the right to use, reproduce, publicly or privately perform, display, broadcast and transmit your submission, digitally or otherwise in all media and formats that are known or hereafter devised. The above rights also include the right to revise, modify or edit your submission as is technically necessary to exercise the foregoing rights in other media or formats.

OK, that’s a lot of legal jargon. To best explain this, take a look at our archive page. What you’ll see is the list of last year’s entrants and winners (and little pictures of the winners’ sites). To promote the contest, we make the links available for those entering the conest this year to see examples. Of course, if your site is temporary or needs to come down for some reason, we’re reasonable folks and can take the link down- to that point, having a link to your site is not a bad thing. We want you guys to have more traffic to your sites and get more Internet exposure. It’s a good thing most of the time.

What will  not do is retain any copyright to your project/ creation. It is your project born from your creativity. If you design an iPhone App and submit it to the IDEA contest, and that app goes on to be the year’s most popular iPhone App (iFart, I’m looking at you), we’re not going to claim that we helped make the app or that the IDEA contest owns any part of your app. The profits you make and the fame that you gain are all your own. What we will do is shamelessly say “That App participated in our contest! How cool is our contest? Very cool!”. If you win, we’ll put up a screenshot of your App on the IDEA site and link to you so future years can see what kinds of projects are accepted for the IDEA contest. What also might happen is, at our annual IDEA reception & announcement of winners, we may show off how to use your app when we announce that you won.

The point of the contest is to celebrate Yalies’ digital creativity… and give out cool prizes. If you do have legal questions, send them to our e-mail, ideas@yale.edu.