Well, at least according to JJ Abrams, now backed by CBS/Paramount lawyers. CBS/Paramount will be dropping the law suit against the producers of the fan-film Axanar, and issuing new, clearer guidelines for future fan films.
That sort of clarity should help. I can appreciate the suits wanting to protect their intellectual property, but the hit-and-miss enforcement of same (allowing a number of fan productions to proceed while coming down hard on others) has made it difficult to tell where the bounds are, and aggravated a number of fans who have been trying to tell their own stories and fill in the gaps while CBS and Paramount fiddle about with the Star Trek franchise.
Hopefully this will help — and possibly (if well framed) serve as a structure for similar IP conflicts in an era when making high-quality fan productions is so much easier than it used to be.
(ObDisclosure: I'm a crowdfunding backer of Axanar.)
Paramount will end its lawsuit against ‘Star Trek’ fan film
Good news ‘Trek’ fans: Paramount will wrap up its lawsuit against the fan film ‘Axanar’ and there’s new trailer for ‘Star Trek: Beyond.’
The clarity will help. I think it finally got through to the decision makers that 1) there was an excellent chance they could lose; 2) even if they did win, it could taint them from a PR standpoint for many years to come. After all, this is hardly the first time Paramount have gone after fans, and their track record is…not great.
The studio got pissy this time because now they're actually breathing new life into the franchise where basically it was dead in the water, aside from a movie here and there.
Theron is right. They probably realized the court of public opinion would kill them so they decided to back off. It's a good idea to let fans continue doing what they're doing, but with some guidelines in place.
Amazon has something called Kindle Worlds that lets anyone write stories in worlds that exist within established franchises but there are different rules to follow, ranging from 'don't kill character x' to 'don't use character x.' They could do something similar here, letting fans create all kinds of adventures with different crews and ships… but leaving Kirk and the Enterprise in the hands of the studio, or establishing that fan films aren't part of official Star Trek canon.
I am not a lawyer, but.. There's classes of intellectual property that require you to defend them, or you lose your right to them. It's not a question of malice, or an unwillingness to let fans play in your sandbox, if the law requires you to go to court to continue to assert your rights.
+Bill Garrett And I am in favor (within certain bounds) of IP owners protecting their IP, as I said. I think people want clarity and consistency in it, however, and in this case CBS/Paramount's actions felt somewhat arbitrary given what they had previously allowed but were now suing over.
There are some fine points in the Axanar case that might have given them some traction, but the suit's blanket assertion of full rights over a wide variety of IP truck a lot of folk as legal overreach and swatting a fly with a grenade, vs. a more considered and assertive-but-appreciative "hey, you love this stuff we own, so here's how much you can love it" kind of way.
That's why I think this action on CBS/Paramount's part is significant — it's not giving up rights, but establishing in a modern world (one hopes) an implementation of fair use that is negotiated and agreed upon.
Yep, I'm also in favor of a clearer framework for use. As movie-making technology increasingly reaches the desktop, home users are more and more able to make stuff like this – this is how Kerry Conran got "Sky Captain" going, after all.
With that power, I'd love to see a standard set of licenses emerge. Creative Commons is one end of that spectrum, but I think there's room in the middle: "you can make Star Trek movies subject to these terms and conditions, but you can't actually make a Kirk/Spock porn film or whatever". I think that's where you're going as well, and sometimes it does take a transgression of the law to make people have this sort of conversation.
My comment was more addressed to the people who might be tempted to rag on media companies for being hostile to fans. Yeah, Disney's effect on copyright extension has probably hurt creativity world-wide, but there's still legal considerations that have to be obeyed, and I don't want fans to take the stance of "fuck you Paramount" while this conversation is going on, because I think it'll hurt in the long run.