You might be thinking: what do copyright law and Star Trek have to do with one another?
Well, a company named Axanar Productions, Inc. is currently being sued in California, basically for making a Star Trek movie.
Everyone has heard of Star Trek. It is, without doubt, one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time. What a lot of people probably don’t know is that all copyright in (and related to) the Star Trek franchise is owned by Paramount Pictures Corporation (“Paramount”) and CBS Studios Inc (“CBS”). So, basically, it is Paramount and CBS together who are suing Axanar Productions.
But what did Axanar Productions do to attract the ire of Paramount and CBS?
In short, Axanar Productions (or the people behind the company) firstly made a short film entitled Star Trek: Prelude to Axanar. (Note: this was a “fan film”, and the term “fan film” refers to a film or video that is inspired by an original movie, or TV show, or book, or comic book, etc, but the “fan film” is created by fans of the original source, not by the original source’s copyright holders or creators.) Axanar Productions (or the people behind it) also apparently wrote a script for a feature film entitled Axanar, and they are in the process of producing that feature film, which could perhaps also be described as a “fan film”.
Now, according to Wikipedia, Paramount (and CBS), who own the Star Trek franchise, traditionally do allow fans to make “fan films” provided “they agree not to sell anything – including tickets, merchandise, or copies of the finished film or series.” So it seems Paramount and CBS are willing to let fans promote the Star Trek franchise, including by making fan films etc, as long as the fans don’t make any money out of it (Paramount and CBS are apparently jealous and protective of the commercial spoils from the franchise, unsurprisingly). The thing is though; this apparently made it difficult for Axanar Productions to finance their original short “fan film”. They therefore turned to Kickstarter and other forms of crowdfunding, and they ended up raising much more than they initially planned.
At this point I want to reiterate that Paramount and CBS are suing Axanar Productions in California. This means that the (copyright) laws that apply in this lawsuit are American copyright laws. I’m an Australian, so I’m not going to get into the legal details. Legal details are usually boring anyway.
What is interesting is to look at all the different ways that Paramount and CBS are alleging that Axanar Productions have infringed their copyright. You can read the full details of the complaint (48 pages of it) that Paramount and CBS filed against Axanar Productions here.
In summary, Paramount and CBS are alleging that (in words taken directly from their complaint):
The Axanar works infringe … by using innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes.
The complaint goes on to elaborate on this in huge detail, including through the use of quite a number of side-by-side image and other comparisons. I’ve set out a number of these below. Note: the side-by-side comparisons below are all extracted directly from the updated/amended complaint filed recently by Paramount and CBS (and the ones below are merely a small selection of what the complaint actually contains). For a number of the examples below, you can probably see where Paramount and CBS are coming from. However, you might be surprised by some of the things that they claim to own copyright over.