User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-5.2.105.85-20170222095120/@comment-188432-20170424215128

DIT remains invalid here.

Participants to this thread have not established that DIT passes our four little rules.

Doesn't pass rule 4

Let me start with rule 4. Authorial intent, at least on JNT's part, is pretty clearly that it's not meant to be part of the DWU. As quoted upthread, JNT's feelings from DWM 249 -- "It was never intended to be part of the Doctor Who mythos, whatever that is..." -- are completely different to, say, Steven Moffat's feeling about Time Crash.

When asked directly in DWM 389, "Is it canon?" (remember, this was a time before Paul Cornell's influential essay had stripped "canon" from our vocabularies), Moffat said this:

"Oh. [Laughs] Yes, absolutely. Time Crash emphatically happens within the ... well, people can make up their own minds about what's canon, but it's intended by us to actually happen ... unless you don't want it to."

The difference is striking and immediate. Some have pointed out that there needs to be some corroborating statement from David Roden, but there is no such rule. DWM 324 easily establishes JNT as the primary author of the work, both through his actual writing and the impact of what he saw as "production realities" on the script. So his feelings control.

Doesn't pass rule 2

More obviously, though, DIT fails rule 2.

As is clearly laid out in DWM 324:

"It was understood by Equity, the actors' union, that the show would only receive a single broadcast in the United Kingdom and would not be commercially exploited. None of the cast and crew were paid for the work on the show."

Since the story was not commercially licensed, it fails rule 2. Though directly proven by the above quote, it's also been in evidence more recently.

While DIT was once included on the BBC's official episode guide, that guide is now archived, and cannot be found but by knowing the direct link to it. The episode guide currently being used on bbc.co.uk/doctorwho the goes straight from Survival to Doctor Who (1996). There is no Dimensions in Time there. And in looking at the newly launched BritBox service, DiT isn't mentioned -- though the site mentions every other serial, even when it is not currently available for streaming.

Those pesky DWM images

Though I think that's more than enough to invalidate DIT, I also want to take the time to look at an argument upthread. I'm not sure it's been argued before in precedent discussions about DIT, so it deserves some attention now.

That there are BBC-copyrighted still images of actors from the DIT shoot in DWM does not mean that the BBC fully own copyright to the production itself.

The images you see in DIT are publicity photos, either posed or taken from the shoot itself. They are merely, for example, Peter Davison in the Fifth Doctor's costume, not the Fifth Doctor himself. Thus, even if we declared DIT valid, T:IUI would prevent us from using the available images in in-universe articles. Put another way, a publicity photo is not a narrative, and only stories count around here.

Moreover, when DWM have a big feature about a CIN special, they almost always run information about how to donate to Children in Need. So even in DWM the images aren't really being used commercially; they're being used alongside a charity appeal.

That would not be the case here at Tardis. We're obviously not going to put up a CIN appeal midway on, say, the Fifth Doctor's article just cause we wanted to use a publicity image from DIT! Because of the very delicate copyright situation, it makes our own use of images from this thing more difficult than images from other productions. I just don't see the value in potentially exposing us to a DMCA takedown situation over DIT.

Just fanfic

And so we're finally at this: DIT is a full charity event. What do I mean? Nobody got paid for anything. Unlike The Five Doctors and Time Crash, which were also CIN "events", neither the actors nor the crew were paid. Again, DWM 324:

The serial -- with both versions of Part Two -- is held by the BBC on D3. Because it was made for charity, it is unlikely to be issued on video or DVD; the programme-as-completed documents read: "N.B. This material can never be used on air again."

In other words, DIT is fanfic.