But that was not ever the norm or reality. It is not surprising to me in the slightest that a corporate entity opts to protect their IPs.
Where fans see culture, lawyers see content.
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Bah, there are tons and tons of fan projects out there…this one was probably competing with an upcoming product.
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Some of the most popular stuff in the early days of (the latest attempt at) VR were recreations of various Star Trek bridges. They were similarly threatened. A while later there were some leaked emails which actually showed an assistant excitedly bringing them to the attention of an exec, trying to get them to realize the potential. Their reaction was essentially “Wow, this is AWESOME! We can sue this guy for everything he owns!”
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Which part of this story leads you to believe that the lawyers decided to go off on a frolic of their own rather than doing what their boss/client, CBS, instructed them to?
Well of course it is a bad idea.
A lawyer’s job is to protect her client and warn them against the risks involved in whatever it is the client wants to do.
You can’t be good at that and also be the kind of go-getting, corporate whizz who ‘innovates’ (well you can but people who can are so incredibly rare that the chances that your lawyer is one is so vanishingly small as to be non-existent).
They are entirely different skill-sets and attitudes.
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I didn’t. I’m just observing that this is how in-house lawyers act under a general and broad mandate from their employers.
You’d think it would be obvious but I’ve seen plenty of instances over the years when an ambitious in-house counsel was promoted to the c-suite. It never ends well.
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We gave those fuckers love, loyalty, and billions of dollars, and now they’re giving us JJ Abrams and Discovery.
You know what? Fuck them. We have The Orville now.
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Those uppity fans that don’t realize they are consumers and not creators. Burn them to the ground and whizz on the ashes! Harumph (while swimming in their money in Scrooge McDuck fashion).
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Regrettably, lawyer’s stock in trade is words and how to use them, whereas engineers and techies rely on more physical entities to prove their point. When you can sell ‘alternative facts’, it doesn’t matter that the end user might get more benefit from a particular mod, or conversely, that putting a rack 5 feet up a wall does not make it a ‘tripping hazard’ (recent description from a friend).
eta: If anyone didn’t see the writing on the wall, search for Star Trek: Axanar. Admittedly, the producers did it wrong by announcing the set could be used for further Trek works, thus throwing in the idea of for-profit, not just non profit fan service, but CBS and Paramount smashed them hard. Pity; the trailer they produced rocked harder than anything I’ve seen in the last decade, by acknowledging that most Trek fans have brains and appreciate good writing.
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I felt this is why they went hard on Axanar: Discovery was going to be about the same time period, and now there would be fan comparisons about who handled that “pre-Kirk history” better. Same logic here, it’s very likely that CBS is close to releasing VR projects of their own, and didn’t want an “obsessively faithful fan version” vs. “official version” competition.
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Did they perhaps run afoul of an exclusive licensing deal?
That’s what I figure. Other fan-based recreations have obtained licensing, apparently with no problem: https://www.startrektour.com/
What sucks is that Stage 9 was a MUCH better recreation. The Bridge Crew version, as far as I know, is only the bridge, whereas with Stage 9 you can go just about anywhere, and even board a shuttle to fly around the outside. So now there’s nothing for those of us who just want to wander around the ship, and aren’t interested in gamifying the experience. And the improvements that these guys were making within the Unreal Engine were jaw-dropping – it looked a lot better than BC.
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Just because you like a TV series doesn’t mean you have any legal right to use it, even in a non-profit context.
I guess if you don’t like that, you ought to press your representatives to completely overhaul the copyright system.
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The link to CBS/Paramount’s “fan art guidelines” linked above says this:
CBS and Paramount Pictures are big believers in reasonable fan fiction and fan creativity, and, in particular, want amateur fan filmmakers to showcase their passion for Star Trek . Therefore, CBS and Paramount Pictures will not object to, or take legal action against, Star Trek fan productions that are non-professional and amateur and meet the following guidelines.
They may not be legally obligated to tolerate fan adaptations of their Intellectual Property but their past approach, not to mention their own written statements, have pretty explicitly supported just this kind of fan engagement. Pulling a 180 like this on their own fanbase is kind of a dick move.
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You’d think it would be obvious but I’ve seen plenty of instances over the years when an ambitious in-house counsel was promoted to the c-suite. It never ends well.
Right. Never works out. Except for Alphabet, General Motors, General Electric, Apple, 3M…
Having your Chief Legal Officer or General Counsel or whatever other title you choose to give your top lawyer sit at the executive level and report directly to the CEO is pretty standard stuff. It is not some anomaly that “never ends well”.
You might want to google “derivative work”.
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Chief Legal Officer (or more commonly General Counsel, a purposeful distinction) is not the kind of c-suite position I was referring to. Obviously most large companies have a lawyer-in-chief, and the ones at successful companies like the ones you mentioned know their bloody place. It’s when they start going beyond their duties as scribes and CYA agents that things don’t end well.
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Maybe it’s time to just leave the Enterprise behind, and just build a better spaceship? Like the Next Generation Next Generation space ship. Maybe it isn’t even Federation class anymore. Maybe it’s a rogue faction of interplantary pirates, battling it out with some Crappy But Serious Paranoid Amangamated Network Of Otherwise Bobblehead Borgs (CBS PANOOBBs). Just like, ramp up the parody and the tech to like, 11. Maybe this is finally where Star Wars and Star Trek universes collide and explode into something completely new.
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