how are they getting away with it? welll a difference between this Fan Film and the creator-licensed spinoffs you mention.
Fan Films own NOTHING and you wont will make any money directly from the film itself.
The creator-licensed spinoff, were I assume meant to make money and owned the rights (or the rights to use) the Whoverse characters that featured in them. They could not use the Doctor, as they didnt have the rights to do so, those right belong to the BBC (and licensed to Big Finish)
If a fan film was in any danger of making money from using the Doctor, or the Daleks, the BBC and the estate of Terry Nation would shut them down. The BBC doesn't need to made to look like jerks by shutting a Fan Film down, and neither does TEOTN.
Legally I dont think there isnt much difference between any of my poorly written fan fics, and even the best made Fan Film.
Of course as Fan Films get better (such as World Enough and Time) and you get full cast films like Of Gods and Men, that is where the line blurs and the likes of Paramount should be keeping an eye on them.
All true. And we should owe a debt to the BBC for having a rather relaxed attitude towards the productions over the years. If you look at the credits for things like the PROBE series, the Dominie and Stranger series, the Mistress and K-9 (ahem), even going back to the very first one, Wartime from 1987 featuring John Levene as Benton, you see many people who went on to make Big Finish possible and ultimately contribute to the TV series itself. Nicholas Briggs and Mark Gatiss in particular.
Creator-licensed or not, the BBC could have put its foot down if it wanted to. Even if legally they couldn't, all they needed to do was instigate a court proceeding and most fan productions would have folded because they didn't have the money to pay for a lawyer. That's how Disney keeps its clamps on.
But they chose not to, at least for the most part. The first few "Stranger and Miss Brown" videos from the 1990 starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant were basically the Doctor and Peri, except Peri had an English accent and one was even based on a fan-written DW story; someone eventually got antsy or maybe the BBC sent a letter going "hey now" so after a few of those Baker's character became Solomon and an entire new backstory was created and "Miss Brown" went away. Same thing happened when Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred made a series of audio adventures as The Professor and Ace; eventually it became the Dominie and Aldred's character was given a new name too.
And of course we can't forget the Cyberons!
But other than that, thanks to the BBC being rather relaxed and the rules in the UK allowing creator-licensing, we were able to get things like the PROBE series featuring Liz Shaw, a bunch of Auton and Sontaran and Zygon productions, Deadtime featuring the Brigadier, Sarah Jane and Victoria, and a bunch of other projects that kept the Doctor Who franchise going for well over a decade until Big Finish came along.
I see Scovell's work as being a next generation of this sort of thing, though in his case he isn't doing it in lieu of a TV series, but rather as a compliment and a celebration of its history. And thanks to the rather short-sighted junking policies of old (and yes there were many sound reasons for deleting the episodes back in the day, but I can't imagine some people weren't going "what the hell are they doing?" back in 1973. Or they would if it was widely known) it's not as if there's a competing BBC release of Power of the Daleks coming anytime soon.
Alex
