Palanca Awards revises rules after backlash from literary community

The Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards has revised its rules for the 2015 submission of entries after members of the literary community pointed out aspects they found problematic.
 
In a statement, CPMA director general Sylvia Quirino said that the parts that include "moral rights" of the entries and its retroactivity to past winning works have been deleted.

"CPMA reiterates its primary objective to promote the growth of Philippine literature, through a platform that will encourage our writers to write, and their deserving works given due recognition by their peers and made available to the public through its library of award-winning works," she said in a statement.

The concerns were voiced by a Palanca winner Alma Anonas-Carpio in an open letter addressed to the award-winning body posted on her Facebook page.

"I re-read the addition to your rules that bothered me thrice, trying to find something to tell me that I was wrong in thinking that your new rules would violate the copyrights of the writers who submitted and still intend to submit work to your contest. Hard as I tried, I could not," she wrote.

She was talking about the Section 21 of the Rules of the Contest, which stated, "In submitting the Work(s) the contestant and parent/guardian (if applicable) (the 'Contestant') accepts and agrees to the rules of the contest (the 'Rules'). In the case of a winning Work or Works, the Contestant further grants and assigns to the Sponsor the concurrent and non-exclusive right to exercise the full copyright and all other intellectual property rights over such Work(s), as well as all intellectual property rights over the Contestant’s previous Palanca Award prize–winning work(s) if any, (collectively, the 'Work(s)'), and waives all moral rights over all his or her Palanca Award prize-winning Work(s) in favor of the Sponsor."

"The words 'waives all moral rights over his or her Palanca Award prize winning Work(s) in favor of the Sponsor,' raised the first red flag. It also puts me in a most uncertain place with regard to any past winning works that are already in your repository by any author attempting another Palanca win. Would this mean that the new rules are retroactive and will cover past entries? If so, then I am even more disturbed by this," Carpio went on.

Additional clauses of the rule said that the CPMA could publish and sell an author's work without written consent, as joining the competition would serve as the author's agreement, she explained.

Anonas-Carpio noted that Republic Act. No. 8293, or the Intellectual Property Code, states that the copyright of original literary and artistic works "shall belong to the author of the work."

Read the new rules of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature here. The deadline of submission of entries is April 30, 2015. — Trisha Macas/BM, GMA News