When is a fan-film no longer just an amateur outing? CBS and Paramount have taken efforts to officially define what they’ll allow Trek fans to create and boldly show in future…
Over the last few years there’s been a controversy brewing between the big studios and fans who want to produce material based on their creations. For decades, fans have penned their own stories – dubbed ‘fan-fiction’ – in which they take the characters from tv shows such as Highlander, Supernatural, The X-Files etc and have them involved in ‘new’ stories, sometimes with events and subject-matter that you’d be unlikely to see on screen for a number of reasons. As technology has improved and become cheaper, amateur film-makers have sometimes moved from the printed page to actually filming such material. To start with this largely amounted to shaky-video and handmade costumes – the kind of thing that you might share with friends but would be unlikely to be seen outside such circles. With the advent of social media and more capable tech, those fan-films became more and more sophisticated and there have been occasional times when the quality has come to rival some of the material you might actually see on a ‘legitimate’ tv show. These were no longer things to which officials could tactfully turn a blind eye…
And therein lies the problem, particularly if you own the rights to an active and ongoing franchise such as Star Trek. While fans have championed the right to creativity, Paramount and CBS have had growing concerns that some fan projects are coming dangerously close to going beyond a simple fun fan activity and achieving a level of quality and finance that means the original rights have to be protected. The companies argue, with some logic and merit, that they have a sole legal right to produce such copyrighted material and to control who does what with that copyrighted property. With projects with budgets sometimes going beyond $50,000-$500,000 (and seeking funding through the likes of Kickstarter), there apparently needed to be some clear rules about what fans could or could not do without stepping on official toes.
An example of this was Prelude to Axanar, a short fan-made film that involved several Star Trek and science-fiction actors and was firmly set in Trek continuity – even if the characters were new or supporting players (think go-to genre actors Tony Todd and Gary Graham). Its creators set up a Kickstarter project hoping to raise $10,000 but ended up with over ten times that amount. It was released as a non-profit enterprise in June 2014. In August of that year, the production team announced plans for a full feature-length effort to be created from the events and story set-up in the short film.The subsequent Kickstarter fund reached over $630,000 and Star Trek: Axanar went into pre-production.
By December 2015, CBS and Paramount began to realise the scale of the fan-project’s ambition. Though it was still technically non-profit, it was now essentially employing a raft of well-known professional actors, using professional-level graphics and was aiming for a finished result they could distribute widely… but for which they didn’t have any ‘rights’. The companies began a lawsuit against the Axanar team telling them to cease and desist and stating that the team were making use of ‘…innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes‘. These were elements that could be licensed out for a fee, but the fan-film was not paying for such and the companies feared a result that would undermine their ability to charge for such in future as well as confusing the wider public who might perceive it as ‘official’ rather than strategically allowed – especially with genuine, official Trek films being produced .
Rather than agree, Axanar Productions decided to actively fight the lawsuit and actually filed their own motion to dismiss the claims made by Paramount and CBS, claiming that the specifics they were including were not actually covered under the copyright laws and that as no film had yet been made by them, it was impossible to seek ‘premature relief‘ from such. The case, initially a niche news story, began to get more coverage in the mainstream with some fan-groups seeing it as an underdog fighting corporations who were reacting in a disproportionate way against loyal fans. Equally various corporations saw it as an equally landmark case to make sure their own properties were not abused or used without permission. Pundits ruminated on where fan-fiction and high-level productions divided and the considerable impact of any ruling.
On 9th May of this year, the courts denied the Xanar team the right to dismiss the case, but there was some acknowledgement from all sides that the case was hurting everyone. A few weeks later, J J Abrams (the director of the official, rebooted films) who was beginning to promote this year’s official Trek film Star Trek: Beyond mentioned in an appearance that he expected the lawsuits to be dropped in the near future and there would be efforts made to make clear what CBS and Paramount would find acceptable – while still allowing some fan material to be created and celebrated as it had been.
So today CBS and Paramount Pictures gave an official statement about what they would see as fair-usage and what they would not accept going forward. Essentially the terms – the full list of which can be found here – says there are limits related to the duration (running times of no more than 15 or 30 minutes for any story), the budgets under which a production will be seen to still be amateur and also on what familiar materials can be used to infer their Trek lineage without actually infringing designs, logos, existing work etc.
The reaction has been mixed. This certainly nixes Axanar‘s plans and will likely halt others. Some fans have found the new official limits to be draconian and an assault on their creativity, some have seen them as generous guidelines by a company that wasn’t legally obliged to let anything through if it so wished… and others merely sees them as a necessary and pragmatic compromise given Axanar forcing the issue and the general modern age where companies need to embrace fans but keep their properties managed.
It will be interesting to see how the relationship between fans and companies evolve from this point forward and what new productions will be made within those rules…
