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by iandanforth 3550 days ago
Amazon is notorious for this kind of challenge. They offer tiny rewards for huge breakthroughs and then they own any IP submitted. The picking challenge is like this.

"Each Entrant hereby grants Sponsor and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free license to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, export, license, exploit, promote, reproduce, make available, publicly display, publicly perform, create derivative works of, and otherwise exercise all intellectual property and other rights in and to any concepts, works, inventions, information, designs, programs, or software that Entrant or his or her Entrant Team develop or submit in connection with the Competition or the creation of the Socialbot,"

Don't let your talented friends throw their IP into this pit!

3 comments

Yup, I keep seeing Amazon trying to run these types of events that show very little respect for the intellectual property generated, creativity employed, and time and effort expended.

They are in full on "suck" mode for their own self interest.

Meanwhile throwing tons of money at another thermostat company.

Yawn.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-alexa-fund-has-invest...

Amazon need to realize that from the outside they appear cheap, arrogant and out of touch with developer mindset.

The Alexa is a good product and worth throwing a lot of money at.

Jeff should be doing whatever it takes to curate and maintain talent and show that customer focus extends as much to the development community as it does to my mother buying windex.

They really need to get serious about developer relations. It's not like they haven't had sufficient warnings, or the opportunity to do something about it.

Well, to be fair, non-exclusive means Amazon gets to use the developed tech in any way. The authors of the IP retain the right to use the tech in any way they see fit too, including making a competing product or applying the tech to novel domains or licensing it to a competitor. Of course if Amazon wanted to apply the IP to a novel domain they could too.

This is a better than most employee deals where the employee has no rights to the developed tech. Even most contract work gives the company exclusive rights as a "work for hire".

It's more like an MIT license between the developer and Amazon rather than a proprietary license just for Amazon.

Wow, that's pretty bad.