Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-45314928-20200727170605/@comment-6032121-20200727173648

They can be legally connected — by a story with the copyright to use both. This is the standard that was set at the end of the original FP inclusion debate.

There are sources which have the license to use "Gallifrey" and Great Houses, which tell us that the homeworld of the Great Houses is Gallifrey. Lungbarrow, for example. As such, the logical link carries over for all stories which involve the other concept, because two different copyrights, from a RW point-of-view, can, from an in-universe point of view, be facets of a single subject that requires only one page.

It is not copyright infringement to say in a story licensed to use Gallifrey that Gallifrey later becomes "the Homeworld," and then to use the Homeworld in non-Gallifrey-licensed stories with the understanding that it used to be the Homeworld. This is the same token whereby which Bernice Summerfield is still "a former companion of the Doctor" even in stories which wouldn't be licensed to say so.

It is possible that this has been misapplied in some cases, but it's a matter of "no speculation", not anything to do with copyright. I fully expect that if by some stroke of luck, an officially BBC-licensed story explicitly says "The War King was once the Master", we will consider them to be the same individual and merge the pages — even though the two are not the same copyright.

That being said, it may well be, again, that this standard has not been correctly applied in e.g. the case of Kelsey Hooper. But I don't believe, for one, that "the Homeworld" should be questioned. One book said that the homeworld of the Great Houses was Gallifrey, and other books licensed to use "the Great Houses" went on to say things about "the Homeworld of the Great Houses" without infringing on any of the copyrighted feature of "Gallifrey" as owned by the BBC.

Oh, and as User:Najawin said, it's simply incorrect to say that… DiSoRiEnTeD1 wrote: If the writers had no rights to use these characters / concepts, and went to special lengths to alter their names to get past the copyright', then we have no right to cover them on the same page as the original. Which is a point that was gone over repeatedly in the original inclusion debate.