#read about my thoughts on tsv copyright law please please you want to read it so bad

[regicidal-defenestration]

... Remember that international law prohibits religious plagiarism, and your national authorities are legally bound to seek out and nullify any attempted breach of copyright. ... - Upon The Birthing Of Gods. Professor Elaine Trask, revised edition.

(the screenshots below have alt text describing the edits I made, then below the cut I go into more detail)

So, yes, I inspect-elemented legislation.gov.uk to vandalise the UK's Copyright Design and Patents Act, in order to create the Peninsulan version! What was fun throughout was converting what we the audience know about gods - there's no guarantee you'll get the outcomes you hope for because they are, fundamentally, wild and uncontrollable forces - to the kind of official sounding text you'd find in a government document, where everything is neat and orderly and gods can be easily defined and controlled

First up - the coat of arms! Also a coloured version that didn't make it to the final edit. According to the first site about heraldry I found, the chevron represents building something noteworthy, salamanders represent matrydom and sacrifice, and the hand represents a religious blessing (as a bonus, it's tilted, which can mean The Blessing Went Wrong, in my eyes). And, of course, the motto is Latin for People Turned Into Shrimp.

The Data Panoptic is a god of tracking and cookies. I imagine it's a purely governmental god, not one of corporate targeted advertising. The kind of sacrifices it gets are made of information, IP addresses, user agent strings, anything that realistically can be held in a cookie (and the strength of will it took to not call it the Cookie Monster was just. so much)

The main issue was. What Part Of The God Gets Copyrighted? What I focused on here wasn't names, branding or similar, but ownership of the god and, more importantly, the miracles performed by them. Ownership largely hinges on being able to prove the miracle was performed by your god, and this proof being passed along to someone working at the TSV equivalent of the Intellectual Property Office. Then, if someone else's god performs an identical (or close enough) miracle, that's an infringement on copyright

This proof of a miracle belonging to a specific deity can be regular sorts of recordings, but also because we're talking about gods, if you fuck up the landscape enough that's allowed too

The Schismatic Courts! In my mind they're the ones that deal with, well, schisms, the godly version of the divorce courts. They're a somewhat separate institution to the branch of the government dealing with IP, but they definitely get involved

"Claiming a miracle" is the main way to breach copyright, at least in the niche I'm having fun in. This means something like "this miracle officiallyTM belong to the Saint Electric but Mr Smith over here is going round saying it was done by his god Ol' Sparky". If this is done in any sort of public or official capacity, it's the same as illegally burning a CD and handing it out in public

However, what we have here is a case of guilty until proven innocent. Gossiping "was that massive storm made by Ol Sparky or Saint Electric?" is allowed, but if you are stating incorrectly that a miracle was performed by a given god, you're going to have to prove that you genuinley did not know you were breaching copyright, Or Else

.

And.. yeah! Ever since the episode where the fact that intellectual property laws can apply to gods, I've been somewhat obssessed with the ImplicationsTM