Selena Gomez or her representatives recently hosted a contest asking people to advertise for her debut album release. The prizes involved a signed CD, a phone call from Selena, or VIP tickets to a concert. The relevant contest rules were as follows "As conditions of entry into a Contest, and by uploading an Entry, each Entrant warrants and represents that the Entrant owns all rights to the Entry he/she is entering in the contest, including, without limitation, the video or digital recording, and the performance contained in each Entry. Each Entrant further warrants and represents that the Entrant has obtained permission from each person who appears in the Entry to grant the rights to the Contest Parties described in these Official Rules, and can make written copies of such permissions available to the Contest Parties upon request." Of all the videos in the top 10, at least two included illegal advertising, at least one used copyrighted material, and I'd hazard a guess that all of them didn't get permission from people in their videos as the rules request. Why does this matter Entrants who took the time to follow the rules, were punished because their video or pictures were not as "good" as they would have been had they cheated. For example, many entrants had videos where people were shown, but couldn't get permission from them to be in the video. They then followed the rules and took those video segments out. Their video ended up being much less spectacular, but they were following the rules, and to compensate, they made note of all their advertising that was taken out through the video description text. As a side note, this contest was judged 2 parts on creativity, 1 part advertising abundance. Yet of all the pictures and videos sent in, all the top 10 selections were videos (biased judges anyone) and on top of that all of them were people running around with simple looking signs (some more or less illegible). If they all did it, how is that creative Other entrants did things like art in sand at beaches, chalk pavement drawings, songs/dances, some even combined many creative aspects. We do not know why this contest was judged so poorly, but we hope that something will be done about it. In the least we hope the contest judges (Selena) will learn from it so as to prevent similar situations that might harm Selena's reputation to occur in the future. After all, to host a contest, get tons of free advertising, then not put the effort into the judging that the fans deserve, really isn't cool. Some people spent hundreds of hours on their entries, creatively reaching thousands of people... only to be showed up by certain videos that might have reached 200 people. Fair unlikely... Plus irregardless of fairness, to pick videos that have legal infractions in them, or that break contest rules is not a good thing. It is important that we bring this up so Selena can make sure that this wont happen again in the future. Maybe some of the contest entrants will learn the importance of following the law/rules too. UPDATE: One of our group's members was recently sent a message by an upset Selena fan in regards to a link posted to this petition on one of the top 10 entries: "why are you being a sore loser that girl tammy deserves to win... selena wouldnt have chosen her if she cared. big deal, she did what she did and worked very hard on it and made it to on the top 10... you cant change that, so leave her alone..." This is a literal example of how the judging of this contest has made people think that it is okay to cheat or break the law. It is also making people think that Selena doesn't mind if her fans break the law to please her. So Selena, or her management, if you happen to see this, you might want to consider taking it seriously... :) you can view the contest top 10 in our links section. IF YOU AGREE WITH OUR POSITION AS STATED ABOVE PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION.

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