IP & License Concerns: But love the competition. Can we compete without?

Gemini API Developer Competition
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Team and I love gemini and this competition, thanks to Google for hosting.

We want to join but we are in stealth and wondering if it’s possible to participate and have our submission judged without being part of the People’s Choice Award or publicly granting Google the rights to use our submission for promotional purposes for 4-5 months until our product is live?
Since we’re still in stealth mode, keeping control over our intellectual property and how it’s used is really important to us.

Here are our specific concerns:

  1. Public Disclosure: Participating in the People’s Choice Award means making our submission public, which could expose our innovative ideas to competitors and risk our competitive advantage.
  2. Promotional Use Rights: The terms state that Google and its affiliates get a five-year, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, and display our submission for promotional purposes. We’re worried about how this extended promotional use might affect our market strategy and IP.
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I am also concerned about this, especially if there is a risk of code being shared publically.

I also don’t know how we can share the code without api keys (since I don’t have dev/test/prod instances at this stage). This will run risk of sharing sensitive apis that is directly linked to my credit card.

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In my app, I created a special menu for the judges to input all of the necessary API keys and a context caching reference.

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Hi Sway,

Thanks for your enthusiasm for Gemini and the competition. We’re excited to have you participate!

I understand your concerns about maintaining stealth mode during the competition. We can accommodate your request not to include your submission in the People’s Choice Award voting, ensuring it remains private. However, I do want to be transparent: if your project is selected for one of the other prizes, we would need to announce and showcase it publicly to recognize your achievement.

Regarding the promotional rights, the license you mentioned allows us to potentially feature your project in marketing materials that highlight the capabilities of Gemini. This is intended to celebrate the innovative work of our developers, and wouldn’t involve disclosing proprietary details or interfering with your market strategy.

I wanted the terms to basically allow us to be able to showcase people’s innovation across multiple channels and through a variety of ways and the only reason we ask to see the code is only to make sure the Gemini API was integrated other than that we wont be doing anything else with it.

Thanks @Sway @Viraj_Vaitha

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Llyod, thanks for thorough and accommodating response. Might be overly sensitive, here but assume everything shared in video be fair use for the public if selected as a winner?

Reading the competition timeline, the earliest the Judge’s Awards will be announced and public is October 2024? Figuring out if aligns with own development and public beta release. :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: on running competition and big prizes making it even more fun.

Sean

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That’s what I understood from the competition rules as well:

  1. Video can and will be used by Google to post blogs or make videos or other content to showcase it, if and only if the app was chosen as winners. Since it’s going to be public on YouTube, I assumed this anyways.
  2. Rules clearly states that we can either submit our entire codebase as an unlisted but public zipped file or a GitHub link (if the app code is meant to be open source). Google will only read the code to ensure that Gemini was used correctly to build the app. The code will not be shared nor displayed alongside the video if the app is a winner.

I was planning to just create a README.md file in the root of the codebase and write the location of this README file in the testing instructions section of the app submission page of the Gemini Contest. The Google judges can read that README file and locate the parts where Gemini was used or other things like Firebase, Flutter and whatnot. We don’t have to submit any sensitive parts like private keys or other things for the project.

I hope I’m correct in my assessment.

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Thanks for this @Sway.

It’s nice to know the code is never shared publicaly, and only the website url/video may be shared.

Can you confirm I don’t need to include API KEYS as some of the API Keys aren’t ones I can allow as an input for the judges, since it’s my own custom backend connected to my vector database, sql database etc…

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