Strange Company`s Director, Hugh Hancock, died in 2018. Strange Company is no longer a registered Company. This site is part of his body of work, and as such it is hosted and maintained by a group of volunteers and as an archive of his work. A comprehensive list of the works being archived can be found here. If you have any problems with the site, please report them using this form.


Democracy: Internet TV



If you're interested in following what else Hugh Hancock and the BloodSpell team are doing, check out:

Death Knight Love Story
the new film from Strange Company

MMO Melting Pot
the best of the MMO blogosphere


Creative Commons?

BloodSpell is released under a "Creative Commons Attribution, No Commercial Use" License. It means that you probably don't have to worry about what you can do with BloodSpell.

It's what you'd expect by common sense, if fifty years of copyright fights hadn't left everyone paranoid about "piracy", "filesharing", "intellectual property theft", and similar bollocks.

In short:

Basically, don't be evil, and we won't be either.

(If you want a bit more detail than that, the Creative Commons Site has all the legal info you could ever want.)

Why are you doing this?

Hugh sez -

"We make movies. When we've made our movies, we'd kinda like people to see them.

There's no evidence to show that non-commercial "piracy" hurts artists' incomes.

(And don't get me started on the term "piracy". Piracy is finding some innocent family or trawler crew, threatening them with guns, forcibly boarding their boat, terrorising them, stealing their goods, and murdering them. It's not copying a f---ing CD.).

I'm more interested in people being able to watch our movies than in making scads of money off them. But people like my friend Charlie Stross have shown that it's perfectly possible to put work out under Creative Commons and still make - a lot of - money.

I want people to be able to show my movie to their friends. I want them to be able to make music videos from it, or fan-fiction, or whatever. If they're doing that, they're talking about our work, they're getting their friends involved in it, they're spending time in our universe.

I don't know what kind of crack you have to be on to regard that as "abuse" rather than, say, "people liking our stuff", or indeed "free advertising". Whatever it is, they don't sell it round here.

Hence, Creative Commons."

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.