Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-5253713-20150518174430/@comment-188432-20150603180626

Almost all Benny stories published by Virgin and Big Finish, audio and prose alike, fully satisfy Rule 2 of T:VS. They were all produced under license by Paul Cornell, who is the legal rights holder of the character, and none of them — quite unlike Faction Paradox — posit a wholly different universe in which the stories occur.

For a very brief moment in time — literally the year of 1998 — Big Finish had rights to Benny, but not Doctor Who, so they used words which obfuscated but did not contradict Benny's connection to the DWU. And indeed that first season of audios, and only that first season, is tricky for us at Tardis because they are in part comprised of adaptations of books that did have the Doctor and other characters in them originally, but legally couldn't have those characters in the audio. So if one did a careful study of them as compared to the novel, a lot of questions would present themselves.

However, since that earliest season, there have been many instances where Benny is undeniably operating in the DWU — the latest case being The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield. One of the earliest incidents was, of course, The Plague Herds of Excelis, which is obviously connected to the DWU, since it's a part of the Excelis Saga. But other named characters and species have appeared in the Benny saga, such as Sontarans and Rutans in The Bellotron Incident, Draconians in The Draconian Rage and the Daleks in Death and the Daleks.

Benny is a part of the DWU, and her legally-published stories are under no threat of violating Rule 2. It's worth pointing out that T:VS is the sum of all four rules. Thus, if a Benny story is written which doesn't specifically reference a DWU element — or one that refers to a DWU element only obliquely — it's still considered to be in the DWU unless Rule 4 is offended. That is, Paul Cornell or another rights holder would basically have to explicitly state that it's not DWU, because the natural presumption is that the longest-serving companion of all time is, yanno, someone who exists in the same universe as the Doctor.

Put another way, using oblique references to Time Lords, the Doctor, the TARDIS, or other elements from the DWU does not mean that Rule 2 has been violated. If anything, it strengthens the Rule 2 case, because it means the author has avoided violating someone else's copyright. The BBC is not required to give their license if their copyright has never been engaged. However, if like Larry Miles and Faction Paradox, the author says that the adventures don't take place in the DWU, then the story is thrown out for violating Rule 4.