RDC TALK, The Royal Dragon Court Podcast

Copyright Infringement, Attribution and the Gary Wayne Dispute

Copyright infringement is not always a matter of someone reproducing an entire book word for word. More often, disputes arise because substantial parts of another author's research, expression, structure, terminology, or distinctive body of work appear within a later publication without appropriate permission or acknowledgement. That is the basis of my dispute concerning Gary Wayne and his book The Genesis 6 Conspiracy Part II.

My involvement in this matter arose from the work of my father, Nicholas de Vere, and the intellectual and historical material associated with The Dragon Legacy. Following my father's death in 2013, I became responsible for protecting his literary legacy while continuing my own research, writing and publishing work. What initially appeared to be a matter of shared subject matter became considerably more serious when I began systematically examining Wayne's book against the earlier works and research connected with Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner.

The issue was not simply that Gary Wayne discussed similar historical figures, bloodlines, traditions or legends. Authors are entitled to research the same history. Historical facts themselves are not protected by copyright. The concern was the extent to which distinctive material, terminology, lines of argument, genealogical interpretation and identifiable concepts associated with earlier authors appeared throughout Wayne's work.

My examination produced a substantial number of references which, in my view, could not simply be dismissed as occasional overlap. Within The Genesis 6 Conspiracy Part II, I identified approximately ninety-six references to Gardner, more than forty references connected with Vere, and thirty-seven references relating specifically to The Dragon Legacy. Entire sections also deal with subjects closely associated with the earlier Vere material, including chapters discussing the "Elven House of Vere."

Those numbers alone do not prove copyright infringement. They are significant, however, because they establish the scale upon which the earlier body of work was being used, discussed or incorporated. Copyright analysis depends not merely upon quantity but upon whether the material taken represents a substantial part of the original author's protected expression.

This distinction matters. Nobody owns medieval history. Nobody owns genealogy as an academic discipline. Nobody can claim copyright over a historical name, a date, a marriage, a battle, a bloodline or an independently verifiable historical fact.

What copyright does protect is the original manner in which an author selects, arranges and expresses material. It can protect original prose, distinctive explanations, original compilations, and the particular intellectual architecture through which research is presented. A later writer cannot avoid scrutiny merely by arguing that the broad subject is historical if the expression, structure or distinctive treatment derives substantially from an earlier work.

This is the TRUTH, Copyright infringement is theft, when you go on 400 podcasts and pretend that the work is your own, and remove the original source, Nicholas de Vere