Modern Law – Creative Administration

Explicit Consent May Be Required to Publish Society Names in Europe

When I wrote a rough draft of the SCA Release Forms Handbook back in 2021, I incorporated a distinction reflecting practice here in the East Kingdom: participants’ modern names are considered personal information and must not be published by the Society without their explicit consent — the same rules that apply to their home address and other real-world contact details — but their Society names are considered “in-game” attributes and their publication doesn’t require any paperwork.

Following the release of the Handbook in 2023, folks from Drachenwald mentioned that their interpretation was different; under the European GDPR, Society names could be seen as “information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person,” and thus protected as personal data, which should not be published without consent.

New York City’s Knife Law and Historical Reenactment

In a couple of recent discussions as part of our local NYC chapter of the SCA, folks have expressed concern about running afoul of the city’s notoriously-strict knife law.

Obviously that law was written to deal with people being menaced or attacked on the street, rather than to crack down on our local fencing practice, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether a well-intentioned historical re-creationist might get caught in the same net.