"JJ Abrams Announces that Paramount to Drop Lawsuit!" (against Star Trek Axanar)

[kane_magus]

According to this Kickstarter update (which I'm pretty sure is a public post and not backers-only, as far as I can tell), Paramount has dropped the lawsuit against Star Trek Axanar, and CBS is "working on guidelines for all fan films," so hopefully that means that Axanar will be able to go ahead as planned (or with hopefully only slight modifications, if need be). That's pretty cool. I have to admit that I'd thought that Axanar was pretty much dead forever.

(EDIT) And now, I wish it had been successfully killed deader than dogshit. (/EDIT)

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

One of the things mentioned there (This has been covered on slashdot and soylent news among other places as well) is that CBS is working on guidelines for all fan films going forward, which this one will need to conform to. So I'm probably not going to hold my breath that it's going to be all going to go well yet. Somehow I'm going to expect licensing fees and stuff to worm their way into the guidelines.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what Disney's policy is concerning fan works now, and I know that Disney has been historically very, very, incredibly litigious concerning copyright infringement issues... but I hope and wish that CBS's policy could be more like how LucasFilm used to be concerning Star Wars fan works pre-Disney, i.e. quite laid back. Hell, they even had an Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Official_Star_Wars_Fan_Film_Awards) thing going on. And, apparently, it's still going on even as recently as this year, (http://www.starwars.com/star-wars-fan-film-awards) so I guess Disney isn't being too awfully tight-assed about fan works like they used to be, at least within the rules of the contest anyway. So, hopefully, CBS will be similarly non-tight-assed about the whole thing.

(EDIT) And Disney is still letting TheForce.net (http://www.theforce.net/) host a bunch of fan films, (http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/explore.asp) as well as letting a bunch of similar stuff (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Star+Wars+fan+film+2016) go up on Youtube, so again hopefully CBS will be similarly non-assholish about such things either.

Of course, that's just Star Wars shit, and I'm not sure if Disney is equally as lenient with shit involving Marvel or their own old shit. They may be the same old tightwads as they always were concerning those, as far as I know, and I do see some stuff on Google about them shutting down such fan films, so hopefully CBS won't follow that example. (/EDIT)

(But then, I don't think anyone has tried to Kickstart crowd fund a huge Star Wars fan thing similar to what Axanar is for Star Trek. My guess would be that Disney would likely come down on such a thing like a ton of bricks similar to how Paramount and CBS initially came down on Axanar.)