dr-who
11 November 2013Copyright

UK broadcaster caught up in copyright battle over science-fiction series

The son of the author behind the first episode of the Dr Who television series has complained to the UK’s major broadcaster claiming it has breached copyright.

Stef Coburn says his father Anthony created the TARDIS machine, seen in the very first episode of Doctor Who, which was broadcast in 1963.

Coburn believes the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which produces the programme, has failed to give his father the recognition that it should for inventing the machine.

The programme, which has its 50th anniversary this month, depicts the adventures of a time-travelling part-human-part-alien known as the Doctor.

He explores the universe in the TARDIS, (an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space), a spaceship which takes the appearance of a blue police box, a common site in 1960’s Britain.

Coburn’s father was a staff writer for the BBC when he was commissioned to produce scripts for the proposed new series.

He inherited a concept for the show from script writer Cecil Edwin Webber in which the structure of the programme had been defined.

However, Coburn said the inspiration for the appearance of the TARDIS came during a walk in South London when his father spotted two police boxes.

Coburn said any informal permission his father gave the BBC to use his work expired with his death in 1977 and the copyright of all of his ideas then passed to his widow who then passed it on to him.

Coburn has demanded that the BBC either stop using the TARDIS in Doctor Who, or pay his family for every use since his father's death.

“The only ends I wish to accomplish, by whatever lawful means present themselves, involve bringing about the public recognition that should by rights always have been his [my father’s] due,  … seminal contribution to Doctor Who, and proper lawful recompense to his surviving estate,” Coburn told the Independent newspaper.

But Peter Brownlow, partner at Bird & Bird LLP in London, said Coburn would struggle to bring forward a case based on IP infringement.

“The right he is relying on is copyright and copyright doesn’t protect ideas but the way in which they are portrayed,” Brownlow said.

“In this case it is the design of a police box, the owner of which would be the Metropolitan Police [the umbrella organisation for London’s police force].”

In 1998 the Metropolitan Police argued it should own the picture trademark of the blue box, objecting to the BBC using the image on comics, T-shirts, videos and other merchandise.

The police force lost the case, following appeal, in 2002.

“What Coburn has done is come up with the idea of using the box’s design in the TV programme but that is not protectable as an IP right,” Brownlow said.

“While the image might be, you would have to look at who commissioned the design."

A spokesman for the BBC told WIPR it registered a trademark for the word TARDIS in the 1980s which was unchallenged and that there had been no challenges since.

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