I may be dim but I can't see how the user of the NaNoWriMo website retains his or her copyright in their work. This is a quote from the website:-
'You give the party (the “Account Holder”) who owns the domain name as hosted on the Service in which you post your Content (the “Hosted Area”) a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable , fully-sublicensable license to publish and use your Content. In addition to the right to publish, you also grant the Account Holder under said license the following rights, without limitation: (i) the right to reproduce or copy or create derivative works thereof; (ii) the right to transfer, deliver, and sell the Content, which includes the distribution via computer and networks; (iii) the right to edit, modify, adapt, arrange, improve, correct, develop, translate, in all or in part; (iv) the right to update/upgrade by adding or removing; (v) the right to film, perform or post the Content in any media, and (vi) the right to use or incorporate all or any part of the Content in any products or services of the Account Holder (whether or not associated with the Service). Except as described in our Privacy Policy, neither the Company nor any Account Holder will be required to treat any Content as confidential. By posting Content you hereby waive any and all rights to be compensated by UserVoice or any Account Holder for such Content.
In order to operate and improve the Service, the Company needs the right to make certain uses of your Content as well. Therefore, when you post Content in any Hosted Area, you also agree to grant the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully sublicenseable, non-exclusive license to copy, distribute, sell, publicly display, publicly perform and make derivative works of your Content on the Service and on services affiliated with the Service regardless of the form of media used or of whether such services now exist or are developed in the future.'
Apologies for the length of the quote, but how can it mean that we the writers keep our copyright in our work?
I feel I must stick my nose in again if you read the posted extract it gives them the right to publish and you can do nothing about it except publish yourself. my family who as I stated job it is to interpret law said you are giving all your rights away, but having said that it does all depend on how publishable the work is. that wasn't meant to be offencive. beware that's all!
Paul.
To be fair to NaNoWriMo, their site also says:' To protect your privacy and rights to your work, none of the novels submitted to our site are read by another human. The text is submitted to our server, run through our word-count validator, and then immediately deleted.
This means we do not keep any copies of your novel, so be sure to back up your hard work!
But when I specifically asked them for an answer on the copyright question they gave me a non-answer. Also, their other statements seem to contradict the one above.
Thank you very much to everyone for all the answers. I'm not sure I understand the terms and conditions either. All I'm saying is that their words don't fill me with confidence, despite all the people who've actually done NaNoWriMo Until I studied what they say in detail I was very keen to do it,because having the motivation to write regularly I'm sure is the key to getting published. My problem is I can't work out what is in it for the promoters of the 50,000 word challenge. Surely they could easily have said that every participant would retain the copyright in their words. Who reads what you write anyway? I'm not clear.