"I make the following findings of fact."

TV Here in all of its glory is the full judgement from the recent Dalek book copyright case. In places the thirty-one page document reads like a esoteric fanzine from the mid-70s as Justice Norris rips into the quality of Nation’s writing, singling out The Chase for his harshest criticism. “I am satisfied that the language and detail on that topic is derived from a memorably bad “Dr Who” series called “The Chase” Clearly a fan.

There are interviews too, with spin-off authors Justin Richards, Steven Cole and Mike Tucker who reveal the process behind writing The Dalek Survival Guide -- “essentially we were buying into an established universe that had already been created” and in other places the ghost of the old non-ironic Matrix Databank from DWM drifts through: “Ms Warman left in the Guide a reference to Zolfian commissioning his chief scientist Yarveling to develop a powerful war machine.”

Other copyright cases obviously do reach into the nitty gritty of a particular franchise or property – see JK Rowling vs. RDR Books (in which the judge has already described the Harry Potter books as jibberish) yet it’s still rather thrilling to see all of these factoids, the obscure minutia of Whonivese mythology, spoken about in the High Court. If The Sontaran Stratagem doesn’t do the job, do you think there’s a chance we could get Justice Norris to rule once and for all on the UNIT Dating controversy?

“Despite Sarah Jane Smith’s contention that she was from 1980 in Pyramids from Mars and Jo Grant’s exclamation in Carnival of Monsters that 1926 is forty years before her own time, the overwhelming evidence in the fashions, the modes of speech and attitude to environmental issues should lead me to the conclusion that the Pertwee UNIT stories were indeed set in the 1970s. I am however swayed by the story Mawdryn Undead which clearly shows Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart having retired in 1976 …”