I first saw this last night, by the time I had a minute to get outraged about it it was already over. But seriously what were the RPS thinking?
Here's the story....
The South West Tourist board have come up with a rather cunning wheeze. Instead of paying professionals to take pictures for them they thought they would ask amateurs if they had any to spare. They were quite upfront that they had absolutely no intention of paying for them but they thought it would be rather thrilling if people saw their own pictures on billboards at motor way service areas, in in flight magazines, at railway stations and splashed all over their website. They wanted absolutely top quality images and stressed that there was no closing date - and no reward of any kind. Basically they had simply decided to stop paying money for pictures forever. They even suggested setting up special access for unpaid photographers if they were good enough.
As you'd imagine the RPS ran a robust article on their website abut this hideous, nasty, "another nail in the coffin of photography as a profession" rights grab not even competition. Except they weren't up in arms about it. Quite the opposite. You had to pay to be a member of the RPS to submit images. Not only did they back screwing professional photographers over, they way they talked it was their idea.
Not surprisingly an angry mob was rapidly formed and they caved very suddenly. So suddenly that the top story on their website is that they have caved in because of "comments from members".
http://www.rps.org/group/Visual-Journalism/SW-Tourism-Project They are reviewing the terms and conditions - possibly removing the word "no" in front of "money".
And in case you think I'm laying this on a bit strong,
here's a copy of the PDF they tried to remove from the internet..... (some of the formatting has gone but that's what happens when you try to rewrite history.