It’s been a weird stretch of time for Star Trek fans. Despite a pretty great new trailer, some are not happy with the direction of the film series and how it deals with beloved characters from the original series. There’s also been the lack of a television series until the very recent announcement and the ongoing lawsuit against fan films created within the series’ universe.
The lawsuit was probably one of the sharpest daggers in recent times, going straight at the heart of something many Trek fans can only hope to do one day. Worse yet was CBS’ lawyers on the subject:
“If it’s based on characters or other protectable elements of the ‘Star Trek’ work, then what they are doing is a derivative work and that’s a copyright infringement…Just because there are a lot of these fan versions being done doesn’t make it legal.”
Luckily, it seems that chapter is about to be closed thanks to J.J. Abrams and Star Trek Beyond director Justin Lin. Lin apparently was instrumental in getting Paramount and CBS to reverse their course on the lawsuit according to Deadline:
“A few months back there was a fan movie and this lawsuit that happened between the studio and these fans, and Justin was sort of outraged by this as a longtime fan. We started talking about it and realized this wasn’t an appropriate way to deal with the fans. The fans of Star Trek are part of this world. We went to the studio and pushed them to stop this lawsuit. Within a few weeks, it’ll be announced that this lawsuit is going away.”
If someone goes to release a fan film into theaters as the next Star Trek installment, without the approval of Paramount, then unleash the legal dogs of war. But it seems like a very odd bit of decision making went into making this lawsuit a reality. Decisions that clearly weren’t built on solid ground according to Abrams’ statement.
Not to mention the lukewarm response to that first Beyond trailer. That couldn’t have helped either. Luckily the second one makes up for it.
(Via Deadline)
