PHoD - DOCTOR WHO

[Legacy_PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

               IMPORTANT NOTICE:-

I'm going to keep this decidedly brief because otherwise I shall become irate to put it mildly and go into "Rabid Foaming At The Mouth Mode" and savage everything in sight.

Apparently due to pungently over-excited (and probably exaggerated) coverage of the PHoD Doctor Who Project on some Doctor Who internet fan site somewhere (of which I was wholly unaware) the BBC have fallen upon said website heavily and have also informed PHoD that they believe his little Modules may "adversely affect sales of official, licensed products" or some such drivel to that effect. Which is obvious rubbish, but there you are.

There has been much volatile argument, statements of the patently obvious which diseased televisual baboons seem unable to grasp and a great deal of fuss and nonsense.

The bottom line of which is that the twisted fascist oppressors have vetoed the PHoD Doctor Who series, apparently labouring under the misconception that it is a multi-million pound undertaking of epic scope. Which it isn't.

Personally I wouldn't have thought a few screenshots (that only impress because they're the result of using a decade-old game engine) would have loomed as such a horrifying threat to the paranoid abnormalists of the BBC, but there you have it. They have prohibited the release of a NWN Doctor Who series and there's not much I can do about it.

Having spent two years working on this, having had such support and enthusiasm shown in various quarters, having overcome so many rubbish problems and delays and Fifi and I having near killed ourselves getting everything ready for release on 23rd November, I am now considerably vexed regarding this matter and...
I'm probably not allowed to use such words here, so I shan't. I'll just go "RRRRRRGGGHH" and bare my fangs and raise my hackles and grind crude effigies of generic BBCesque figures into the dust until I calm down.

I apologize to anyone who really wanted to play these Modules, but the matter is out of my hands. NWN DW has been prohibited and that means that, outside of Fifi and I, chances are nobody else will ever see these Modules.

R.I.P PHoD DW Project.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <never one to cut off his nose... >

This... angers me.
This actually makes me angry.
Anything I can do from this side of the pond,  ask.

<...without good reason>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WhiZard]

               Often big companies will ban anything in sight related to their product for a duration in which they hope to glean from sales of a major release.  Your timing at a particularly nice anniversary may have placed you on the ban list regardless of the type of work you produced. There may still be hope after this critical anniversary is far passed to perform such a release.

EDIT: removed an example as there appears to be much more involved with the game's removal than a threatened law suit from outside.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par WhiZard, 06 novembre 2013 - 06:17 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               Change the balls on the daleks to eggs, change the toilet plunger to a spatula, and rename the dr to Dr What. You should be good to go. Create it as a parody and you can make anything you want.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_werelynx]

               Aye, parody is good.

Another way would be to write petition, in which we tell fascists we're not gonna buy their products from franchise if they won't allow us those series.
Just get 10k people and maybe they'll even read it. :|
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               Or post a tweet complaining about the bullying BBC legal department, as all the UK national newspapers have learned to keep an eye on them. The #tag that would be a good place to start is #savetheday. I may be on there (twitter that is (I only follow)) but never having posted on it, I don't know how.

TR
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Tarot Redhand, 06 novembre 2013 - 05:53 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

               Making a fuss of that kind at this juncture will merely be stupid and convince the enemy that they were wholly correct after all.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               can we at least see this stuff privately? And I never thought I would say this, but it is too bad you are not in the US, because if the law is enforced properly this sort of thing is impossible (unfortuantely the law is almost never properly enforced in the US since we are more or less a banana republic). But anyway the supposed limits of these sorts of suits in the US are as follows:

Because of the potential breadth of trademark dilution, Congress wanted to ensure that trademark owners could not use the law to silence speech protected by the First Amendment. To this end, Congress created specific exceptions to the dilution statute for the following uses of a trademark:

• any fair use of a famous mark in connection with comparative advertising or parody, criticism, or commentary upon the famous mark owner or the goods or services of the famous mark owner;
• all forms of news reporting and news commentary; and
• any noncommercial use of a mark. See 15 U.S.C. § 1125©(3)

Its the last one which seems like a no-brainer to me and why I never even worry about groups like the BBC on my own creative endeavors. But the UK doesn't really have "Freedom of Speech" enshrined as we do in the states.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par henesua, 06 novembre 2013 - 08:50 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Valthrendir]

               In addition to henesua, I found this on the wiki:
''Fanfiction is not infringing if it constitutes fair use of the underlying copyrighted work. In determining whether a particular use constitutes fair use, courts consider the following four factors:
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.''
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.''

The BBC seems to be using number four for their argument. However, if you take into account that the playerbase of NWN nowadays is quite small (not sure how many people are playing exactly, but it is way less than before). Therefore the amount of people that would play these free modules isn't enormous. (= no effect on the potential market)

In addition to that, if you take a look at the licensed games that are available, there is nothing worth mentioning that has been produced with permission from the BBC (e.g. the recent ''adventure games'' and ''eternity clock'' . A good, storybased IP involving Doctor Who would offer quite some opportunities for an adventuregame.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Valthrendir, 06 novembre 2013 - 09:38 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

               As PHoD calms down (slightly) and wipes the rabid foam off the evidence before him, he begins to see certain anomalies in it. Further, he begins to suspect that there's a lot more to this than it at first seemed.
Now suspicious that Spleens of the highest order are involved, PHoD has begun hunting.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               Just found out that the episodes of dr who that were broadcast in 1963 will be out of copyright come the 1st of January 2014 under UK copyright law. Could this explain some of their jitters? see -> this.

TR
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Tarot Redhand, 06 novembre 2013 - 10:15 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

               As I suspected, there is considerably more (less) to this than it initially seemed.

Having become suspicious and foraged about in the undergrowth a lot, I come to the conclusion that what I'm dealing with is, in fact, a small and pathetic cabal of Spleens PURPORTING to be the BBC. Most of the sham was fairly convincing, but there were one or two flaws which just might prove fatal to them if they're who I think they are.

Firstly, apologies to the BBC who are NOT after all, apparently even involved anywhere down the line. (On the other hand, the BBC are guilty of producing the puerile crap they refer to as a "new series" of Doctor Who, so what the hell).

Secondly, there is a very good reason I have never been a member of a Doctor Who fan group of any kind. On the one hand are people who simply like something and on the other hand there are "fans" who take themselves and that with which they are diseasedly fixated far too seriously.

It would now appear that a decades-old "battle" (of the most pathetic kind imaginable) between two retarded little cliques of DW fans lies at the root of this rubbish. As I understand it, one group of the demented baboons made very positive noises about my NWN project to a degree I actually find quite disturbing and not a little irritating and so the second pile of debased baboons decided to try to scupper said project by pretending to be the BBC to annoy the first stack of mental baboons.

Due to convention appearances I've made with many of my Creatures, I have some knowledge of a variety of people involved in DW fandom (many of whom are perfectly rational and pleasant) and vice versa. Thus I now have a distinct suspicion as to the identities of the Spleens involved. And I know where at least one of them lives and it isn't remotely outside my travel range.
If my suspicions become certainties regarding the exact identities of those behind orchestrating this garbage, I will push their faces in so far there are no words for how far in their faces are going to be pushed.
And if you ARE who I think you are and you're reading this, WORRY.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Valthrendir]

               First of all, there was something fishy about this matter. There are plenty of mods out there for other games that are not the subject of copyright claims. Nevertheless, it could have been possible. If what you describe is true, I think that there is no need to get rabid about this. Even though you have been trolled, you figured it out not long after the attempt itself.

As for ''Classic'' vs ''Modern'' Who, this argument has been going on since prior to the reboot of the series in 2005. For me, currently having seen 7 of the 11 doctors in action (1-3 and 8-11), both of the classifications have their up- and downsides. As with most ''fanboy''-ish arguments, this argument is based on opinions and therefore not factual.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Valthrendir, 06 novembre 2013 - 11:26 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

               I'LL decide what I need to get rabid about, thank you very much.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               So will this project continue? Or do I need to trade you some spleens to get a private play through?
               
               

               

                     Modifié par henesua, 07 novembre 2013 - 02:34 .