General conditions of participation for the Excire photo contest

These apply exclusively to Excire’s own photo contests. Partner contests have separate conditions of participation.

1. By participating in the competition, you accept these terms and conditions as a binding agreement between you and PRC GmbH (Excire). Conflicting terms of use will not be recognized.

2. All persons who are of legal age are eligible to participate. Employees and shareholders of PRC GmbH, administrators of PRC GmbH and jury members are excluded from participation, as are employees and shareholders of any sponsors. Insofar as persons are excluded from participation, their relatives are also excluded from participation.

3. During the upload phase, all eligible users have the opportunity to enter photographs in the competition. If there is more than one photograph, they must not be identical. The submitted photos will be evaluated using Excire AI so that each photo can be assigned a rank in the list of submitted photos. In the event of multiple, almost identical submissions by a participant, we reserve the right to remove the lowest-rated photos from the competition. Each participant can only win one prize. Should a participant finish in the top three with more than one image, the subsequent entries will move up accordingly and receive the prizes. Images and their variations that have finished in places 1-20 in our previous competitions are also excluded from the competition.

4. You may only submit photographs that you have taken yourself and to which you retain all copyrights and rights of use. The persons recognizable in the submitted photographs must have consented to their publication, unless they are merely insignificant accessories. Photographs of other copyright-protected works can also only be used with the permission of the copyright holder, unless they are also only insignificant accessories or are covered by the freedom of panorama. You hereby guarantee once again that you will comply with the above conditions.

Insofar as third parties assert claims against PRC GmbH (Excire) in a comprehensible manner for infringements of the above regulations or other rights, in particular industrial property rights, the photographs in question will be removed from the competition at the dutiful discretion of PRC GmbH (Excire). In the event of culpable infringement of third-party rights, we reserve the right to demand compensation for our damages.

5. Motifs with offensive, pornographic, child-endangering, nationalistic, racist, violence-glorifying or other illegal content will be deleted and excluded from the competition. This also applies to photos that are obviously AI-generated. Participants must provide the unedited original files (RAW/original file) of their submitted photos within 24 hours for an authenticity check if they are ranked among the top 20 photos. Otherwise they will be removed from the competition.

Basic image editing such as color and brightness adjustments are permitted, but the addition or removal of image-defining elements is not permitted or must be explicitly stated in the description in the case of image editing techniques such as focus stacking. Excire reserves the right, at its own discretion, to exclude individual entries or participants from the competition, for example if the spirit of the “Excire” competition is violated, if deadlines are missed, if there is uncertainty or in the case of off-topic submissions. Only photographs that were submitted during the upload phase and meet the conditions of the competition description (e.g. subject, technology used) will be considered in the competition.

6. Furthermore, the competition organizer reserves the right, at its own discretion, to exclude persons from the competition and to deny them any prize if there are valid reasons for doing so. These may include, for example, breaches of the conditions of participation, unfair trading, manipulation to gain an advantage or misleading information. In the event of exclusion, the participant will be informed directly of the exclusion from the competition and disqualification from winning.

7. Photos submitted during the upload phase will be stored in encrypted form with the user data on the Host Europe server of PRC GmbH. They are therefore not accessible to the public. Exceptions to this are the photos that make it into the top 20 of the competition. These will be published on the relevant competition page together with the name of the photographer.

8. You transfer to us the non-exclusive and limited transferable right to reproduce, distribute and publicly reproduce your photograph free of charge on the Internet, in digital applications and in print. These rights are transferable to PRC GmbH, Maria-Goeppert-Str. 3, 23562 Lübeck, for the purpose of editorial use on the Internet, in digital applications and in print. For this purpose, you undertake to supply the original photograph. A revocation of the transfer of rights of award-winning images or images listed in the TOP 20 in the competition is excluded.

9. German law shall apply to the exclusion of the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). The place of jurisdiction is Lübeck, Germany.

10. Legal recourse is excluded.