A few weeks ago we wrote about a contest that NBC Universal was putting on, officially through New York City, asking students to make propaganda films, repeating NBC Universal/MPAA talking points about how copyright infringement was damaging NBC Universal. In going through the fine print on the contest, we noted a few oddities. First, you were not supposed to actually use facts or data and make a case. Instead, the rules flat out told you what your position was. You had to support the claim that "piracy costs jobs." Think the data shows that the real problem is legacy companies like NBC Universal not adapting to embrace new opportunities? Too bad.

Even worse, the detailed fine print in the contest (which is pretty difficult to dig out), shows that if you win, you lose the copyright on your video. Seriously. It's pretty amazing that a video contest promoting the supposed importance of copyright to creators involves requiring creators to give up their copyrights. The prize? A measly $500.

So we're offering a competing contest, here via our Insight Community platform. We're asking people to create PSA videos showing the impact of technology on creativity today. We're not asking you to advocate any specific position at all, because unlike that other contest, we're pretty secure in our beliefs and won't melt like the wicked witch of the west should someone submit a PSA that challenges some of them. We believe that the best videos will be both creative and have a factual basis.

Also, as per our standard Insight Community terms and conditions (and again unlike that other contest), you retain the copyright to whatever you do. We would recommend a permissive license -- with our favorite being something like the CC0 Public Domain license or the WTFPL license, but it's entirely up to you. The only condition -- as per our Ts & Cs, is that we're granted a license to make use of the work as well, for the sake of showing it on our sites (Insight Community and Techdirt).

Oh, and while that other contest is offering $500 to the winner, we're offering $1,000. As a result of our original post, a bunch of you stepped up and offered up about $500 in donations for this contest, and we're matching that with another $500 ourselves.

Finally: in order to enter, you need to:

have an Insight Community account (your Techdirt login will work if you have one, or create one on the Insight Community site), create your video and upload it somewhere public, such as YouTube or Vimeo, include your Insight Community username at the end of the video, add an "insight" entry to this case, in which you link to your own video.

That's it.