: Even if MS Marathon was really bad, I'd probably play through it. It's easy
: to pick up an FPS and get into it, compared to something like Myth III.
: So, play both, and talk and speculate about them on the same forum. Bungie
: Studios are technically the only ones with the rights to dictate official
: or canon Marathon material
This is where the question/confusion/debate comes up though - the legal owner of the franchise has the right to say what can or cannot be done with the intellectual property that they own. But that is not what canon means in literature. Canon refers to the collective body of information which comprises our (collective, humanity's) knowledge of a particular topic. In the case of fiction, that particular topic is a fictional universe, a thing which only actually exists in the mind(s) of it's author(s). Therefore, the only people who can say whether something is "true" to the fictional universe, and therefore canon, are the people who actually 'contain' that fictional universe, it's authors.
The law may prohibit them from writing anything more about that universe if they no longer own the intellectual property written about their universe. That does not mean someone else owns the fictional universe itself, which only exists in the author(s) mind(s). The other party only owns some document describing the universe, and thus the rights to make any derivative works.
Say Peter Jackson and JRR Tolkien were contemporaries. Tolkien conceived of his vast fictional universe long before he wrote the Lord of the Rings, and published the detailed history of that universe, the Silmarillion, only post-mortem. Lets say though, given our funky little time warp here, that Tolkien wrote the LotR as a script for Jackson's movie, and they were never books. Tolkien could STILL have written and published the Silmarillion later, even without permission from Jackson (and... Paramount? Who published LotR the movies?) so long as he did not include explicit references to the LotR, which the Silmarillion only does in it's appendices.
The universes described by the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings are similar enough, that given the same author, they could be considered one canon about the same universe even without explicitly stating the connection. Now, if Paramount or whoever owned the right to LotR had the exclusive rights to the LotR franchise and didn't work out a deal with Tolkien, then Tolkien could not SAY so, legally... but we'd all know it. If Paramount went and made a crappy LotR IV: Gollum's Resurrection, without Tolkien's work, that would not be canon. It would be franchise, but not canon.
So uh... I kinda lost my point here. I think I just meant to say that legal franchise != literary canon.
