Surely they don’t think fans that watch the Axanar movie are doing that instead of watching the canon stuff? I can see why they might worry about their legal duty to defend their copyright claim. And maybe they really thought the Klingon language could be copyrighted!?
IANAL, but that’s exactly what they seemed to be doing. I figured they must have thought there was some sound legal need that outweighed alienating paying fans from their own releases.
Choosing that one way is better overall ≠ failing to consider certain factors that might weigh against it. I would assume it was a carefully considered strategic choice.
I’m just curious what the competing factor(s) were that they initially determined was worth potentially alienating a sizeable chunk of the core fanbase.
That’s perhaps arguable - it results in a free movie, but if it’s bad it could be said to “diminish the brand,” and if it’s good, it’s a movie that, it could be argued, people are seeing perhaps instead of going to see a commercial Star Trek film. (And it certainly represents a very large pile of money that Star Trek fans handed over to make the film rather than spending it on Paramount products.)
It also opens the door to some interesting dynamics where any commercial filmmaker who wants to get paid to make Star Trek films can do so under the label of “fan film” and crowdsourcing it. Which essentially undermines the whole notion of this kind of intellectual property. (Which in this context I don’t consider a bad thing, but I’m sure Paramount would disagree.)
I see the concern over fan films becoming for-profit enterprises. But I’m pretty skeptical that the sort of core fans who would even know this movie exists are going to see it as something to see instead of Paramount’s own releases. Even if they disliked it, most trekkies at least hate-watched Into Darkness.
Abrams gave you an STD?
One step?
But in which one direction?
I wish. That’d have been more fun to get, and less time and pain to get out of my system.
Maybe not - at least maybe not this one in particular. But what happens when there’s a whole bunch of fan movies? With a highly divergent-from-source-material official movie series and increasingly professional “fan films” that hue as close to the inspiration as possible, it could create fan communities around the fan films, not the official ones.
Yup, the tech presents a new problem. Like you said, copyright reform needed. Hopefully just maybe the media conglomerates will come to the table when they realize how important a fanbase is to marketing their properties and developing a loyal following. And I say that as a trekkie, but it’s true of many franchises I don’t give a hoot about. Not that I have any illusions that any reforms or agreements will be equitable or fair, but at least perhaps a niche can be carved out for increasingly professional fan fiction?
I am not a lawyer but from what I’ve seen the problem was less ‘you are making a fan movie.’ And more the fact they were wanting to very explicitly use this movie as a springobard into a for-profite studio, which… alongside the whole paying themselves a salary might have had the paramount beancounters thinking tht they had no real choice but to act in defense of trademark as it edges the line too closely into ‘for profite.’
Generally paramount is awesome about letting fanworks do their own thing. It just seems these guys wanting to form a studio with this as their flagship product to act as advertising and work-piece to attract talant counts a little too much as profite.
To me this shows how insane copyright has become that it’s even an issue. Once upon a time this wouldn’t even be considered infringing because a) copyright terms were reasonable, so something that was both 50 years old and exceeded the life of the creator was public domain, and b) works so vaguely derivative that they didn’t contain any of the same characters or anything like the same plot, but only existed in the same fictional universe, likely wouldn’t have been a problem even if it had been still under copyright.
As it is, it’s actually pretty weird that this situation exists where Paramount has rather arbitrarily ended up with the rights to this series, doesn’t wish to create more content in the style of the original program, but legally no one else who wants to is free to do so either.
To be clear, Paramount’s complaint & FAC in the case do not make a single trademark claim. They are strictly making copyright claims.
Why? I have no idea. Personally it smells a lot more like a trade dress case than a copyright case, but IANAL, let alone an IP law specialist. (If anyone finds an analysis of why they may have chosen to claim copyright but not trademark, I’d love to read it.)
Note that copyright, unlike trademark, is not “enforce it or lose it” (generally speaking).
So “had no choice”, IMHO, is inaccurate. They chose. Like it or dislike it; think it’s strategically wise or not… that’s another issue. But AFAIK at least there is nothing that actually forced them in the sense of “we would prospectively lose a legal right if we don’t sue Axanar”. (Whether or how Axanar — or suing Axanar — might affect Paramount’s own sales, I have no idea. But that’s a strategic choice, not a legal force.)
Barratry for barratry’s sake. Same diff.
Depends how much you bought the idea for.
I dunno. I’d say a lot of corporations ended up owning ideas they spent a pittance on; they’re still going to defend their ownership of those ideas regardless of how much money someone else is making off of them, as long as they hope to make money off of them.
That movie sure seems to bring up some strong feelings. For myself, it was one of my favorite movies of the year when it came out.
What was that about IKEA? Did they go after the people who made the web soap opera Ikea Heights? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9gkYw35Vws
They went after IKEAHackers, before public outcry slapped some sense into them and they backed off from hassling a site that was essentially giving them free advertising. I thought I remembered some kind of partnership deal, but the About page still says it’s not affiliated or endorsed by IKEA, so.
This is the sort of conversation you get into when you can own ideas for more than a couple years.
