User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-5442547-20130319195443/@comment-1209840-20130401000007


 * See, it was produced in such a way that no one fully owns it. It was a one-time-only, for-charity-only thing, so none of the actors gave permission for a repeat airing. This means that the likenesses of the various Doctors and companions are no longer legally licensed from the copyright holders (i.e., the actors themselves).

By this reasoning, none of the Virgin New Adventures, Telos Doctor Who novellas, licensed Marvel Comics adaptations of Doctor Who or countless other things would be valid sources for this wiki, since the licenses that made all these things publishable have now expired and they can no longer legally be reprinted in their original form. None of these things are owned by the BBC, and their use of Doctor Who trademarks means they're not fully owned by their creators, either, because they are no longer licensed to find non-BBC publishers for them as written. Clearly the only relevant factor is whether they were at any time in history legally licensed to air or be printed. The specific arcana of copyright law is otherwise not only irrelevant, but beyond or pay grade as editors of a fan wiki. Even if, by chance, one of you is an intellectual property lawyer (and Czechout clearly isn't), going over the fine prints of legal contracts has nothing to do with the spirit of a wiki like this.


 * Has the BBC or the copyright holder indicated that they don't believe the story is a part of the mainstream continuity? 

Czechout claims there is no copyright holder, but the BBC, who obviously have the final say as to what is Doctor Who and what isn't, acknowledges this story as part of continuity by putting it in their classic episode guide: That trumps whatever any of the crew members (who, remember, have no copyright claim according to Czechout) might have said.


 * Yes, it's obviously parodic. Remember that parody has two meanings. The most common is, "an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect." But the other meaning is, "an imitation or a version of something that falls short of the real thing." 

This is not how the English language (or any language I'm aware of) works. By this reasoning, if there was a wiki rule saying something to the effect of "Be sure sure to hit the preview button and POLISH your edits before you publish them" then we'd all be obligated to send them to Warsaw before hitting "post" because "Polish" has the additional meaning of "relating to the country of Poland." Words can have many meanings, but sentences involving those words need only refer to one of them, and almost never refer to every possible definition of a word simultaneously. This rule was obviously meant to rule out something like the funny one-panel cartoons in magazines and The Curse of Fatal Death. "An imitation that falls short of the real thing" is too subjective and vague to be of any use to us. Some argue that the entire BBC Wales version of the show is "an imitation that falls short of the real thing," or apply that to the Colin Baker years, or the TV movie, or the Moffat years, or everyone that followed Hartnell, or anything else they happen not to personally like. How do you objectively judge whether or not one incarnation of Doctor Who "falls short" of any other? You can't. So that definition is inapplicable. For the purposes of this wiki, a parody has to be intended to mock, comment on, or trivialize the original, a definition that includes Curse of the Fatal Death but not, as far as I can tell, Dimensions in Time. Even that definition is borderline; The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was intended to comment on and mock elements of Doctor Who and its fandom. Even this wiki acknowledges that Whizz Kid was a parody of anal-retentive fans who claimed the show was no longer as good as it used to be (a parody of its former self, if you will) without having actually seen the earlier episodes, and the Gods of Ragnarok commented on the fickle audience that the show depended on for its survival. Love & Monsters parodied elements of Doctor Who fandom as well. The novel The Blue Angel included a number of characters that parodied equivalent characters from the original series of Star Trek. Don't get me wrong: all of these stories had enough non-parodic elements that I'm not actually arguing they should be thrown out, to say nothing of the fact that they were obviously intended to be in continuity. I'm just saying that using the word "parody" as a sole criterion for inclusion debates can get tricky.