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Dr Who-ha

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

The IPKat is mildly amused by the coverage of the steps taken by the BBC against any anonymous online knitting affectionado (see the Telegraph's report). The lady in question created knitting patterns for creating replicas of popular Dr Who baddies, and posted them on the internet. The BBC responded by threatening copyright and trade mark infringement.

The IPKat reckons that this has all the makings of a good exam question. What is the copyright position of a person who creates a knitting pattern (presumably a literary work) from a television picture of a CGI character (an artistic work) or a costume (artistic work, or perhaps work of artistic craftsmanship)? And what about the trade mark position of someone who gives away knitting patterns, the results of which, when knitted, may end up on eBay? And that's not to mention passing off... One thing's for sure - in this country, the fact that it may or may not be transformative use won't help you. Merpel, however, can't understand why anyone will willingly spend time knitting models of characters which are meant to be made out of blobs of human fat.

Full post as published by IPKat on May 14, 2008 (boomark / email).