Back in 2009 the movie Wolverine appeared on the Internet in advance of its official release. The copy was unfinished and provided a version of the film to downloaders that would have otherwise remained hidden forever. Now that same dubious status has fallen to Doctor Who.

After appearing online over the weekend, what claims to be episode one of the new series of the hit show was uploaded to The Pirate Bay today. The 1.49Gb file is marked as a “pre air screeneer” with a claimed running time of one hour and 16 mins.

While leaks of TV shows are much more rare than movie leaks, this copy is particularly unusual. Clearly unfinished, the video is both heavily watermarked and monochrome.

As can be seen from the image above, the copy carries the text “Prepared for Marcelo Camargo at Drei Marc.”

Marcelo Camargo is the owner of Marc Drei Productions, a Brazil-based production company known for its subtitling work. There is no suggestion that Camargo or his company is responsible for the leak.

This is the second serious breach in a matter of days to hit Doctor Who and the BBC. Just last week scripts from the new series leaked online after inadvertently being made available to the public by a BBC Worldwide office in the U.S. It seems likely that this video comes from the same source.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

But in copyright nothing is ever so simple. In fact, even a TimeLord’s brain, capable of dealing with the intricacies of time and space, would find it a complex subject.

At the heart of the assertion is that in the New Year the first episodes of Dr Who will fall into the public domain. However, the reality isn’t as clear-cut as it seems. While the broadcast copyright will expire, the other copyrights in the episode will still exist. This means that the broadcast may well fall into the public domain but the episode itself won’t.

Under the UK’s 1956 Copyright Act, broadcast copyright expires 50 years from the end of the year when a show was first broadcast. This means that the first six episodes (the four comprising An Unearthly Child – the first story – as well as the first two of the seven episodes in The Daleks) will expire 50 years from the end of 1963, on January 1 2014.

However, the episode as a whole won’t be in the public domain. That’s a whole lot more complex.

Copyrights for the episodes themselves expire at the end of the year that is 70 years after the death of the following persons, whichever comes last:

- The principal director
- The author of the screenplay
- The author of the dialog, or
- The composer of music specially created for and used in the film

Since the director of the first four episodes, Waris Hussein, is still alive, the 70 year clock hasn’t even started. Likewise, Christopher Barry, the director of the majority of the Dalek’s episodes, is also still alive. So we’re looking at 1 January 2085 as a realistic earliest date (assuming neither die in the next month, and they’re the last surviving).

Legal blogger William Tovey has done some investigation on the topic and found that the earliest definitive date an episode drops into the public domain will be The Aztecs (the sixth story of season 1) in 2083. However, if (still living) script-editor Donald Tosh didn’t contribute to the dialogue, then The Time Meddler (season 2, story 9) will beat it into the public domain in 2057, followed by The Smugglers (season 4 opener) in 2068.

And this is where even the Gallifreyan brain goes crazy.

Ninety-four years before the first Doctor Who episode drops into the public domain in the UK is just nuts, and that’s not the actual first episode. That will have been under copyright for at least 130 years before entering the public domain. And this all depends on the term not being extended again.

Worse, this is only for the UK. Copyrights in every other country will be calculated using their own systems and timescales, and one is left with the belief that the real reason time travel was invented concerned perpetual copyright.

So while people in the UK will be able to share the broadcasts come January 1, in order to do anything more they’ll need to wait at least 45 years, while people in other countries will have to run the gauntlet of their own local copyright laws.

The complexity and extended term length is enough to drive anyone interested in honesty and fairness crazy. It’s a no-brainer to suggest that a paragon of virtue like the Doctor, more interested in doing right than following the letter of the law, would have real trouble following copyright law as it’s currently written around the world.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.