Doctor Who sued for use of TARDIS by writer's son

[johnmiic]

Hey, just in time for the 50th anniversary! Sounds like a case without merit to me:

"The son of a former Doctor Who writer is suing the BBC over breach of contract, claiming his father invented the TARDIS, and they owe him another dimension’s worth of money over it."

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/doctor-tardis-sparks-lawsuit-family-creator.html

[jwyblejr]

If the trademark is still valid,I don't think he has a chance.

[jds1911a1]

His father may have actually written the LINE in an UNEARTHLY CHILD which named the Ship Tardis and it's acronym. Techically if he created the name then there is a leg to stand on, the same way Robert holmes estate owns the sontaran and AUtons, Bob Baker owns K-9, and Terry Nation's estate own the daleks as concepts, even though BBC designers made those ideas concrete.
So if a court decides that he does have a valid copyright on the term TARDIS and it's acronym then every piece of merchandies that displays the term would equeate to a payment, but the symbol of the police box, specifcially as envisioned in Dr who he can't lay claim to
- at the time of it's inception it was a common civil government device (like the red phone booths are in the UK and even a phone booth was in the states before the proliferation of the mobile/cell phone). At that time they couldn't copyright it because they hadn't created the symbol and it predated the show
- the Dr who police box was not a surplus / junked london box it was a prop designed and built by bbc designers to basically emulate the actual boxes. In context their purpose was to allow a foot patrollman to check in (pre cb walkies) and also lock up a suspect while waiting for a paddy wagon to pick them up and take them to the station. I've only ever seen a real police box once. The ones that were still in glasgow in the 90's bit larger and more rectangular- Jon Perwee had a photo op infront of one for the Pertwee years video release (see on the Reverse the Polarity documentary) so I suspect the london ones were larger too
It wasn't unitl they went out of use in the 80's that the BBC could even lay their own trademark on the symbol and that was purely for merchandising reasons.
And if they lost the right to the term I can foresee them going back to symply calling it "the ship" as Hartnell did for most of the first season, or type 40 or TT (time travel) capsule