I doubt you could ever stop these kinds of contests so your best bet is to try to get professionals to boycott them while checking out the enteries to look for copyright violation. That will be the only thing that will shut one down is a copyright violation lawsuit that cost someone a bunch of cash. Thats how they shut down napster.

If you are a professional working on these things, you should be working on you business because it will pay off much more in the end.

What if you arent employed? wouldnt doing SOMETHING be better than NOTHING? and “crowd sourcing” in some form or another IS the way thinks are going :( There is a new sort of skill set now growing in demand.
The “Job/spec splitter” – that is, an individual who can talk a job specification and split it in to multiple, perhaps seemingly unrelated elements – elements in a size and scope for crowdsourcing and the like. These individuals are also tasked with developing the protocols to coordinate a project during this crowd-dev and reassemble the bits.

Get into this trap due to not having
the knowledge of their rights
I myself only realized this after comming to this website
Yes, I was conned by someone in a contest I won in a famous “Crowdsourcing” contest. He still has not paid me when The company
(crowdsourcing company) asked him to pay. he simply said he will file a case against them for harrasment.
Now I will never do work for Free

(link removed…)

I don’t like to give miscreants any linky love but I wanted the No-Spec community to be aware of yet another one.

I wrote back to my contact at prova and shared the No-Spec link with him but I doubt he or his firm will be swayed.

However, I think that you’re simply going to fail protesting about (though I do think whining is more appropriate a term) Crowdsourcing. The fact is, designers are always going to be willing to take part in it, even if it is not in their best interests. Unless you’re going to try to create some sort of designer’s union (good luck getting people in China and India to join), you can’t change that.

And as long as designers take part, it will exist. To a buyer, it offers a far greater value – at least from their point of view – than any other method that exists. For the price of a single designer making a single design, you can get hundreds, and they’ll have to make the changes you want.

And as for who is more worthy of giving advice, buyers simply aren’t going to ever care about what a designer thinks. And in my opinion, that is actually a good thing. You work for them, not the other way around. As a programmer, I don’t get to go to the person I work for and tell them their program has to be done differently; short of the impossible, I’m expected to do as told. That is what I am paid for. If I want to create a program completely how I want it, that’s something which I have free time for.

You can’t force designers to not take part, you can’t compete with the age-old model of “the customer is always right”, and you definitely can’t do it this way. Complaining is not going to solve the problem; it is just going to make buyers look down upon designers as a whole. That will have the opposite effect of what you want.

What would I suggest? Change your business model. To what? No idea, but defending the old one is a fight to the bottom. The RIAA and MPAA have money, politicians, and general public opinion behind them, and they cannot protect their failing business model. Why do you think you can protect yours?