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Update: SCA Disclaims Copyright to Heraldic Officers’ Work

Earlier this year I learned that the SCA has long relied on an unwritten interpretation of copyright law that does not seem to be well supported.

I’ve encouraged Society leadership to reconsider this approach, motivated in part by the fact that this would have implications for my work on the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art, but it’s been difficult to make much headway and now a month has passed since my last email without any reply.

While I am not a lawyer, I am profoundly skeptical that the Society’s interpretation holds any water, and so I have decided to move forwards without giving it any credence, as laid out in the letter below.

[Update:] I’m very happy to report that the Society Seneschal has responded, stating that they are not claiming copyright to the armorial depictions produced by heraldic and scribal officers.

It remains unclear to me on what grounds they claim copyright for some creative works created by volunteers but renounce it for others — however, as a first step in the right direction, I am pleased by this declaration.

Accessing SCA Member Information

For reasons discussed here previously, I was curious as to how complex it might be to programmatically access member data from the SCA’s new member portal.

It turns out the switch from MembersOnly to NeonOne has made this dramatically easier, and we can access member data in just a few lines of Python without scripting Chrome or hand-crafting any RPC calls.

From the Archives: Annexation of the Southern Marches

When the Middle Kingdom was created in 1969, the borders between kingdoms do not seem to have been precisely drawn, but it appears that all of the seaboard states continued to be part of the East.

I’m not sure exactly what folks at the time had in mind, but I think it was something like this:

The borders of the East remained this way through 1972, by which time branches had been founded in Florida and Georgia.

From the Archives: Women as Fighters, Knights, and Sovereigns

For those with an interest in SCA history, it can be intriguing to follow a thread of discussion as Society policy is defined and changed over time. Below is one such example, showing a sequence of entries from the minutes of the Board of Directors discussing women in armored combat over the years 1975–1977.

Spot-Checking the 2022 Org Chart

The Year End Report that was recently published included an updated org chart for the Society which is slightly different from the one published in 2019.

A couple of the changes took me by surprise, and might be the result of typographical error — I’ve written asking for clarification and will update when I learn more.

Release Form Improvements

When the new Release Forms Handbook was published earlier this year, it included updated versions of the release forms themselves.

Although I had a chance to provide feedback on the contents of the handbook, the new forms unfortunately weren’t shared with me prior to publication, so I wasn’t able to proofread them or provide suggestions for their appearance.

Complaints as a Service

Thank you to Thomas Blackmoore, Society IT Manager, for the mention in last month’s report to the Board.

Commendations: Matthew Cavalletto (Mathghamhain Ua Ruadhain) – for invaluable assistance in finding issues that need to be resolved
President’s Report for April 2023 Board Meeting

It’s good to know that the ceaseless stream of emails I send to Society officers are productive, even if they may at times be somewhat annoying.

Appearance on “This Just In…”

Last night I spent an hour in a livestreamed conversation about many of the topics previously discussed on this site.

For your convenience if you’d like to skip to a particular topic, here’s an outline of what we talked about:
2:35 Introduction to My Perspective
6:50 Collecting an Archive of Board Minutes
10:57 Cataloging a Decade of R&Ds and TRPs
21:25 The “125 / 0.5%” Drama
29:13 The Sanction of Brian De Moray
38:28 The List Archives Breach
47:12 How Can We Improve Things?

A Decade of Sanctions

There has been a recent spate of interest in the number of Society-level sanctions issued by the SCA in recent years. This information is publicly available, as it is contained in the meeting minutes of the Board of Directors, but it isn’t organized in a consistent fashion, so counting the records is perforce a manual process.

To facilitate this type of analysis, I am making available a list of sanctions-related actions extracted from the quarterly Board minutes for the decade from 2013 to 2022. These records are found in a Google Sheets document linked to below, along with a statistical breakdown of action types by calendar year.