[ANSTHRLD] Permission to conflict??

[kobrien at texas.net]

Quoting Alden Drake <alden_drake at sbcglobal.net>:

> What about this...
> If someone wants to register a piece of armory that has a conflict, and 
> the person exhausts all reasonable attempts to contact the person for a 
> Letter of Permission to Conflict, they could apply for a waiver from 
> Laurel (which may have some preliminary steps, like the Principal Herald 
> must sign off on the application) allowing them to forgo the Letter of 
> Permission to Conflict?


Again, we hit multiple problems.

#1 - it is not in line with Corpora C.1.3 (see below) as it does not apply 
the standards of difference uniformly to all registered items.

3. Heraldic Administration
a. Standards of difference and other rules: Laurel shall define standards 
suitable to the type of item to be registered, and apply them uniformly to 
all such submissions. These standards shall be designed to support the 
historical re-creations of the Society and to provide sufficient difference 
from names and armory registered within the Society to avoid undue confusion, 
to avoid the appearance of unearned honors or false claims, and to provide 
sufficient difference from historical or fictional personages to prevent
offense due to obvious usurpation of identity or armory. [...]

#2 - different people's views of "reasonable attempts" will vary

#3 - what if the contact was received and ignored?  That's a response.  
Example: Joe Newbie wants Device X.  It conflicts with the device for Joe 
Fighter out in way-northern An Tir.  Newbie finds a mention of Fighter on his 
canton's website and sends him an email.  The email gets caught in Fighter's 
spam filter and he never sees it OR he gets the message, reads it, decides he 
doesn't want to grant permission, and hits delete.

A policy like this puts the requirement on the owner to respond to every 
request for permission to conflict and it's simply not reasonable to assume 
that everyone is going to do that.

#4 - [just thought of one more] what about a submitter who decides to ignore 
it when the owner of the item tells him he won't grant permission; the 
submitter goes to his kingdom and says "I couldn't get ahold of the guy who 
registered the armory in 1979".  Documenting a negative (no contact) is a 
problem.  Documenting a positive (here's a letter of permission to conflict) 
gives a much more solid paper trail.

Mari