I'm running a small contest so I can finally have Mac tutorials on my site. I'm going to post a page template and whoever makes the tutorials I like best gets the prize money. In exchange for the money I have rights to the tutorial. What should I put in the rules to prevent from me getting into any legal trouble? IE: in the unlikely event that because of their tutorial on my site I become a quadrillionare and they want to sue me for money?

Some state laws requires for any contest / draw to be registered with the local lottery & gambling authority. In some cases, the prize money must be put in escrow before the contest begins. Qualcomm hosted an OpenGL ES contest not so long ago with the help of GameDev.net. You can take it as an example.

http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/qualcomm2004/

And here were the rules (legal stuff):

http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/qualcomm2004/rules.doc

Quote: Original post by Lazy Foo
I'm running a small contest so I can finally have Mac tutorials on my site.

I'm going to post a page template and whoever makes the tutorials I like best gets the prize money. In exchange for the money I have rights to the tutorial.

What should I put in the rules to prevent from me getting into any legal trouble? IE: in the unlikely event that because of their tutorial on my site I become a quadrillionare and they want to sue me for money?

Yes, there are laws. Lots of laws.

Don't expect any good legal advice here. If you want to know about real law, talk to a lawyer. Yes, you'll need to pay a little money, but you were planning on paying for tutorials already, so it shouldn't be a big deal.