Criticism
The Microsoft Corporation has been criticized for including provisions in the competition's legal documents, stating that by accepting their prizes, winners agree to allow Microsoft to use concepts, techniques, ideas or solutions from the winning applications "for any purpose." Also, the competition has been criticized for being rather Microsoft-centric, with demands such as "the entry must be designed on.NET Framework 2.0 using Microsoft Visual Studio" or "30% of the scoring in this round will be based on use of showcasing the.NET framework".
Microsoft's Rules and Regulations, however, contains a section stating that students' intellectual property will be respected, and that neither Imagine Cup competition nor Microsoft claim ownership of the materials provided by the competitors. It is important to highlight that for the sake of the judgment, internal elements of the solution might be made public to the judges.
Read more about this topic: Imagine Cup
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)