S4_obsessed has a great article that was posted today about photography contests.

Words/phrases like "perpetual", "waive", "irrevocable" and "unrestricted" in their terms should be enough for anybody to turn around and walk away, assuming people actually read the terms and conditions carefully!<ul><li><a href="http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2008/02/19/how-the-rights-to-your-photo-are-being-hijackedthrough-photo-contests-social-media/">Kiss your rights good bye</a></li></ul>

You know they are getting paid huge sums of money by someone to drive right over your rights, by putting stuff like this in the terms of use. It's getting to the point that you'll have to have a site all by yourself with small copyrighted JPEGs all over the place, just for friends/family to view your pics.

been that way for a while now. Besides, contests won't get you anywhere.

Hosting is dirt cheap.. Heck, I should start a site for shooters and protect all copyrights etc.. =)

I still try and convince my friend to stop giving out his photos for free but to him he doesn't care.

But I use it to see what everybody else is up to LOL.

But one of Facebook's terms and conditions had something to do about images cached and how they can use it for whatever they please. Use the flickr plugin and FB caches the thumbnails (and who knows what else) on their server. Tried to find that in their terms and condition and can't seem to find it anymore.

But yeah, nice if you can host all of your own images on your own server.

even if there are millions of free images out there. There is no way to stop this flood as there are simply too many people out there shooting and posting the images with no regard. The good thing is that most of these images are crap from hobbyists. Anyone even remotely serious knows the game.

It's a sleezy tactic. Hopefully more people will become a little more educated about this and demand a little more respect.

srsly...

what size of images would you host ?

basically I am totally uninformed on hosting/ having my own website.

... a long time coming. The "free" internet is dying, or rights are. Take your pick.

You can host full res images if you want.