I've always been the kind of person who has trouble specializing. It's hard for me to focus on just one thing when I've got ten other things I want to do, too. The upside of this is that I know a little about a lot of things. The downside is that I'm not particularly good at anything. The term Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none might as well have been coined to describe me.

But for the last several years, it's been very clear that one of my skills is more in demand than any other: Sound Design. This is partly because I'm good at it, and partly because sound design is a neglected field. There aren't that many people who do it, and there are even fewer who do it well. Many in the theatre community think so little of Sound Design that you can't even win a Tony for it anymore (more on that here).

This is how you know I'm a copyright nerd: I read contest rules in their entirety. The contests I'm interested in almost always involve the submission of some work of art, so the transfer of rights involved in entering these contests is always fascinating.

Today, for example, I discovered that by entering your recording in this contest, not only do you grant the company running it the right to use the recording however they want forever, but they can also grant the same rights to anyone else. In theory, this means that they could sell your recording, or the rights to use your recording (e.g. to use it in a movie), making all the money they want without ever compensating you. 

Is that likely to happen? No. Is it worth knowing what you're getting into? Absolutely. I'll still probably enter, since it's just a cover contest, but I would definitely think twice before submitting something original.