DISCLAIMERS
By registering & participating in SCB, you, the individual, and your group agree to the following statements:
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SCB strives to be a positive atmosphere that encourages its participants to enjoy the experience while testing & pushing their creative limits. We reserve the right to disqualify or bar entry to any individuals(s) or group(s) that do not contribute to our mission of fostering & protecting said environment. This includes unsportsmanlike conduct such as bullying, cheating, discrimination, harassment, and any other disruptive forms of conduct towards SCB Staff and/or other participants.
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Continuing on "disruptive conduct": SCB reserves the right to disqualify or bar entry to any person(s) or group(s) found guilty of bullying, discrimination, slander / harassment of others, plagiarism, & any other forms of misconduct in any & all public spaces, (i.e. Twitter, Discord servers/group chats, Forums, etc.) that risk harming viewers, participants, or SCB Staff.
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Participants are asked to report any instance(s) of disruptive behavior (as stated above) to SCB Staff ONLY. Participants are NOT to harass or even approach the individual(s) or group(s) they suspect of misconduct, or they, too, run the risk of being disqualified.
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SCB will judge entries with utmost fairness and courtesy, free from personal biases towards individual(s) or group(s). However, understand the SCB staff is still human. While we do our best to stay impartial, everyone has their own preferences, and SCB judges are allowed to voice said inclinations within reason. Participants are allowed to disagree with our opinions & challenge them under certain circumstances - yet under NO means allowed to harass our judges or staff over decisions made.
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SCB Staff & Judges do not claim to be professionals in any way, shape, or form. All comments and scores given, while underneath the standards we hold ourselves to, are still subjective opinions & should be treated as such. Our words will never be the "be all, end all" opinion of other people's work. Participants are welcome to question and discuss them with us, but under no circumstance allowed to harass or bully SCB into appeasing their personal agendas.
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The participant is solely responsible for their own health and well being throughout SCB. If the CB starts to directly affect your health, work/school, and/or any other responsibilities / obligations - SCB implores you to consider your current status, and if there's any options to allow continuing that does not come at extreme cost(s) to your well being. Health first > CBs later. After all: there is no entry if there is no you (the person making them)!
- SCB is willing to accommodate certain, unfortunate circumstances if they are not already outlined in the existing guidelines, but only if participants effectively communicate with SCB, in a time frame well in advance of round deadlines.
On the topics of inspiration, plagiarism, and using references:
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The whole point of SCB, or chorus battles in general, is to create & share original creative content. While being inspired by others, recreating ideas/concepts you like, and using reference materials are perfectly valid within the creative process, there is a fine line between "borrowing" and outright copying / stealing. While there are no hard and fast rules dictating what is "too much" or "too little" regarding inspiration and reference use - plagiarism is vehemently frowned upon and hardly ever ignored or missed.
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Bottom-line: instances of theft & plagiarism - such as traced art, stolen backgrounds, audio/visual samples or clips used without permission, etc. are grounds for immediate disqualification, unless you can provide written permission from the author(s) saying you have the EXPLICIT right to use their material(s) as shown.
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Participants that find instances of theft/plagiarism are to contact SCB Staff only. They are NOT to harass the group or individual in question or they, too, risk disqualification.
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Though entries that seem highly similar / closely inspired by other published works does not fall under direct plagiarism, understand your group may receive judging deductions, purely from a creative standpoint. Rather than being penalized for "copying", you may just be scored lower due to lesser originality regarding the ideas used, or that too little things were changed from the source material to consider it as its own idea.
- Feel free to contact SCB on Twitter if you still have questions.
Blacklist
Blacklisted individuals are those found with an extensive history of misconduct that SCB deems them unfit to participate in our chorus battle.
Our blacklist requirements cover the grounds stated below:
- Potential participants who have attempted or in actuality have used SCB as a method of personal monetary gain.
- Potential participants who have harmed or attempted to harm, fellow group members, other participants, judges, or any affiliated staff; harm as defined as the impairment of physical, monetary, or mental health; during the run of past SCB's.
- Potential participants who have, in past, been officially warned during past SCB's regarding their behaviour or attitude, and did not adopt a satisfactory standard of behavior afterwards as per our zero tolerance policy.
- Potential participants who have, in past, posed significant harm to the communities within which SCB is situated; harm as defined as the impairment of physical, monetary or mental health.
If you have been identified by SCB Staff and Judges to have contravened on any of the above, you will have been placed on our blacklist and thereby barred from participation. In most cases, this decision is non-negotiable.