Alpkit shall not be responsible for obtaining or verifying any intellectual property rights relating to award entires.
Where an applicant has protected his invention through design registration or patent then Alpkit will require that this is marked clearly on the entry. It is worth remembering that the information you provide may be published in the public domain.
The design must be original and not in breach of a third partys intellectual property rights. As such the entrant confirms that he/she is the legal owner of all the intellectual property and moral rights of the entry.
It is the responsibility of the entrant to secure protection for a product, which is being entered before submission. This includes proof of ownership, patents, trademark or design applications, or other any other intellectual property registrations, permissions or applications. This information should be included with the entry by the entrant.
The entrant should indemnify all parties involved in the award including Alpkit, the Outdoors Show, the promoters, the judging panel, the agents and employees against any third party claims that could arise from submission of the product to the competition.
Entrants accept the judges decisions as final and binding.
All entries should be available to the organisers for exhibition purposes. In the case of finalists this will include 3-D models and high quality artwork/sketchbooks. All items will be returned to the owner once any publicity and promotional activity surrounding the award and future awards has finished.
The overall winner will be announced on the final day of the Outdoors Show (16 March 2008).
I don't like point 5 at all; indemnifying all parties involved against claims? Not a chance in hell that I'd sign up for that.
Alpkit have utterly lost the plot with this one, I think, which strikes me as very odd. They are asking contributors to take complete responsibility for everything, for no return that I can see.
Brianetta - you're self-employed yeah? So you have to fund your own pension, holidays and sick pay? Or not?
If you're an employee you would get much less as an equivalent hourly pay because your employer will top-up your NI contributions and income tax for you and pay you for holidays, bank holidays, sickness, maybe private health care, season ticket loans etc etc. The £25 as a self-employed hourly rate helps to off-set all of that.
Remember there is no such thing as bad publicity. F&T might be thought to play that game regularly on this forum.
I do hope Alpkit are not going to start stocktaking on a Thursday and changing their name to AlpKit Ltd on a Friday.Any agreement the compo 'winner' might be lucky enough to obtain would be with a company named Alpkit and not with a company named AlpKit Ltd.
Entrants accept the judges decisions as final and binding.
Who are 'the judges'?
By dint of entering the compo, the entrant is accepting any decision as final and binding, as long as it has been passed by 'the judges'. I'm surprised the wording isn't 'fully binding and without access to legal recourse'.
I hope we can answer more of these reservations in the Q&A session on Tuesday. But if there is a question you want to answer to and cant make it, then email alpkit and i''ll post it up with a response.
I would just like to clarify a few points as a lot of people read these posts, and hopefully the background to what we are trying to do will give you an idea of our motives.
We are not after ideas, this is not at all what this is about. Jim and I are both designers. We have notebooks full of stuff, tents, rucsacks you name it. And to be honest we struggle to keep in stock the products that we have aleardy designed so this is not the motivation.
We are not trying to steal anyones design. There is no where in the rules or the T&Cs that says we take ownership of the design. What we were trying to do (and maybe we have failed) is show that once an idea is in the public domain and if your serious about this design you need to protect it. We dont wanted to be sued by anyone saying that their idea was pinched of the colab08 website by somone else. As far as the prize goes yes you right it's not alot. All i can say again is that we are small company we simply dont have the cash to splash out. All we have tried to is balance the cost of exhibiting at the NEC and the exposure we get from the competition. We wont be making any money from this.
The motivation is simply to see what everyone can come up with. To have 9 ideas at the outdoor show that really show the industry what innovation is about. Innovation is not about adding another LED on headtorch or a new color for a jacket. In the states and i'm sure a lot of you have seen this stuff on various websites there is a real open source culture. People are not scared about sharing their ideas with the hope that improvments come from that. I went to a recent conference about innovation in the outdoor industry, one issue that came up was why innovation is so stifled in this country. Our fixation on IP was one factor cited.
I really want to plead with everyone that is reading the comments above and thinking that there not sure about entering, please dont be put off, give me a call, send me a email and i can talk through any reservations. If there is someone out there with a good idea then i would love to think that this a good chance to make it a reality.
> We are not after ideas, this is not at all what this is about. Jim and I are both designers.
That was one thing that puzzled me; I know you're both very capable designers, so I didn't see why you'd need other ideas.
The fact that we've all misunderstood suggests that the wording is a little unclear... I think the misunderstanding comes with the name of the competition, and the concept behind it; CoLab - a collaboration lab. this sounds far too much like you're going to work with other designers to develop Alpkit products.
Have a competition to illuminate innovation by all means, but give it a different name; one that doesn't have that collaborative association.
The coLAB name comes from the coLAB part of the alpkit site. Where we have been happy to look at ideas/ suggestions/ improvements to our own gear. This is as i see it collaborative design. The gourdon would be a case in point. Where we have looked at the feedback, posted it up for the world to see (good or bad). And then made those improvements as and when we could.
I guess were we thought the competition would be quite collaborative is that later on in the competition the finalists can accept feedback on their designs (by you the users) in order to make improvements.
So..we cant change the name. If Ken and I have made a boo-boo in the choosing the name then i guess we will have to live with that. But i would hope everyone will give this competition a chance.
We all love looking at, and talking about new gear and to be honest i would hope that some of the ideas that everyone reading this have had, see the light of day. I genuinely believe that we will get to see some very clever ideas, but that does mean that we will have to encorage all those people to enter.
