Paramount and CBS get to the nitty gritty with Star Trek Fan Film
First if you haven’t seen this, click play below:
A Star Trek fan film is being sued over it’s use of copyrighted material over in the United States. The above is a short film by Axanar Productions put out as a statement of intent, showing how much could be done with a reasonable budget and good premise. However the actual followup indiegogo funded film series is now tied up because Axanar itself is facing a lawsuit from Paramount and CBS.
The two companies have filed an updated complaint, breaking down the above prelude into more than 20 pages of specific shot by shot infringements. This leads to some very tenuous links between the two, including the fact that Prelude to Axanar is somehow infringing as it is a science fiction adventure film…or that they copy a specific hairstyle even down to saying that having a “Uniform with gold shirt” is somehow infringement is several shades of silly.
The good people over at Techdirt have broken these down a bit more in-depth with more details on how a lot of the items in the complaint are not copyrightable in the first place, things like costumes and the similarities in “mood and theme”.
The Axanar feature film is something I will be keeping an eye out for on the horizon, if it doesn’t succumb to the lawsuits, from the Prelude above alone. It looks like it really is going to be special.
