Dana wrote:
You can't copyright a character either, but when you copyright a written work you gain the right to control use of the characters of that work in derivative works. The most plausible scenario is that the BBC controlled both the B7 and Dr. Who properties (I'm not sure if Boucher wrote the script in which Carnell appears--if so, he might be the copyright proprietor) and told him to go ahead and have a laugh.
Not sure if someone's covered this since trudging through email backlog... Didn't the BBC have a weird system in place for its drama series and serials that original characters remained the property of the person writing the script? In the case of B7, the ownership of the premise and the main characters (and, I should imagine, the image of the Liberator) was joint between Nation and the BBC, but those who invented characters in scripts they wrote for the series kept ownership of those characters and would have to be paid each time that character was used (e.g. Carnell). The classic one on 'Dr Who' is Nyssa, who appeared in a single story ('The Keeper of Traken') and then was brought back as a companion - the Beeb consequently had to pay the writer who invented her (Johnny Byrne?) each time she appeared.
Una