Star Trek

[Buster's Uncle]

Two corrections:  I think it was Farragut the set thing happened with.  -And The Tressaurian Intersection was Starship Exeter, not Farragut.  I'd swear it some of the same people in the casts, though, and don't know what the difference is.

[Rusty Edge]

TODAY"S GOOGLE DOODLE IS A THEREMIN!

[Unorthodox]

I really want to build one...

[Valka]

So all that said, about the Anaxar lawsuit:

It's about fan ethics in fanfic.  When we produce derivative works, we're playing in someone else's sandbox, and have to stop if they notice and say to stop.  It's really that simple, legally and ethically, and the rest is just details.  We don't bother asking permission, but we have to be aware that it's someone else's universe and we have practically no rights on the face of it.

I used to run a Dune forum, and one day we gained several very nice members - who were part of a Spanish fan community and were making their own Dune fan film. They were strictly nonprofit, doing everything from either their own pockets or with a little help from their immediate RL family and friends, and they hadn't taken a penny from online fundraising sites. Their trailer (in Spanish) was up on YouTube, and they were very proud of their accomplishment. I never got to see it, but I saw stills - and it was a different interpretation, but not a bad one.

So what happened was this: They made the mistake of letting KJA/BH know, and the HLP (then-current copyright holders) went ballistic. They didn't care that the film was a labor of love, they didn't care that the fans just wanted to finish the film and weren't interested in making even a penny. They shut them down, cold. In fact, it was so fast that by the time I even heard about this, the trailer was gone from YT.

It's a shame, as they were friendly people who loved Dune, and had some interesting new ideas that nobody else had done. For one thing, they included all five of the Emperor's daughters. And they were as close to age-appropriate as possible (no nonsense like casting Susan Sarandon as Julie Cox' younger sister). The costumes and props were very well done.

Part of the reason the HLP twitched on this, I think, is because a new pro Dune movie was being planned at the time. Nothing came of it, but the HLP cracked down on all kinds of Dune stuff - even the community on the Second Life site had to gut itself of any and all Dune references and specific story elements. Heaven forbid anyone have any creative fun with Frank Herbert's books! And all because of a movie that never got made (and likely never will).


Another situation with copyright concerns Marion Zimmer Bradley. She used to invite fans to send her Darkover stories. She'd accept the best ones and publish them in a fanzine, and later on some of those reappeared in the pro anthology The Keeper's Price. Anthologies became a regular part of the Darkover series after that, and MZB had scads of stories submitted. Of course she couldn't accept all of them, but she read them.

And then one day, somebody submitted a story that dealt with the very same characters and situation as MZB was working on herself, for a new novel. When the fanfic author found out, she demanded co-author credit and payment, since MZB couldn't prove that she hadn't used some of the fan author's ideas. MZB's editor/publisher was furious, the book MZB was working on had to be canceled, and that was the end of Darkover fanfic. Word came down that no more was allowed and anyone who had any at home was ordered to stop writing it and destroy anything they already had (or rewrite it so nobody would be able to tell it was a Darkover story).

Well, ordering me to destroy something I wrote for my own amusement and had no plans to share with anyone is going too far, in my opinion. So there are some situations in which Kirk's line in Star Trek VI applies: "The word is 'no.' I am therefore going anyway."

The MZB Literary Trust can police the fanfic sites if it wants (it missed a few; there's fanfic out there if you know where to look, and if you read Portuguese, German, and French). But it can keep its grubby mitts out of my fanfic binders. The last time I showed any of my Darkover-related fan output was a few costume sketches to a friend nearly 30 years ago (she wanted to dress as a Free Amazon for the SF convention we were going to). Nobody else has ever seen them, and never will.

So I'm unapologetic about continuing with various fanfic activities, as long as they're private or in such limited circulation that there's no chance that they're ever going to see any site where lawyers can demand they be removed.

Some people on TrekBBS are fretting about fanfic. Well, fanfic's been circulating around the world via snailmail for decades. We did it that way before and we can do it again if need be. It would be a shame, though, to force it underground. Fanfic is the training ground for a lot of people who go on to become pro authors. It's how Diane Duane honed her skills, and she's one of the best pro Star Trek authors ever.

[Buster's Uncle]

There IS that.  Don't rob any banks and the FBI (Mounties) won't find it and rat you out to Disney for your Little Mermaid Ursula/Sebastian ship you never showed anyone...

[Buster's Uncle]

Disappointment in action:

A cousin's boxed set of TNG movies showed up on the kitchen counter today, and am I all "I'll wreck my nerves and blood pressure with the first one"?  Nosir, I am not.  Am I all "I'll watch First Contact, which I liked, everyone's favorite and the only one I saw in a theater"?  No.  Am I saying to myself "I liked Insurrection for the same reasons everyone else hated it - it was like a double-wide episode instead of making the same mistake all the others, including ALL the real Star Trek ones, did of making it big and movieish and getting too far away from the source and now I'll see it again"?  No.  No, I did not.

No, I said "I'll finally get to see Nemesis and decide for myself if and why it sucked - everyone but me was wrong about Insurrection, after all!"

-So guess which one is missing from the boxed set?




God just stays mad at me for holding out for the deal Thomas got...

[Buster's Uncle]

...He may also be pretty put out about two serious bits of blasphemy I've engaged in late the last two days, actually...

[Valka]

Nemesis isn't anything that benefited my life for having seen it. It just confirmed my opinion that no matter how hard they tried, they would never be able to pull off a decent TNG movie.

Do you have access to any of the myriad American online sites that show Star Trek stuff? I know they exist because people on TrekBBS keep saying airily that "well, why don't you just watch it online on this-that-and-the-other site?" and it never occurs to them that those sites are geoblocked from Canadians.

[Buster's Uncle]

Those can't be legal unless they charge, surely, and I don't know where they are and would never pay.

[Valka]

Hulu is legal, isn't it?

[Buster's Uncle]

Yeah.  Not free, though.

[Unorthodox]

Nemesis isn't anything that benefited my life for having seen it. It just confirmed my opinion that no matter how hard they tried, they would never be able to pull off a decent TNG movie.

Wait...

Are you saying First Contact wasn't decent? 


I seem to recall WATCHING Nemesis, but not much ABOUT Nemesis...which is probably not a good sign.  IMO, they lost the cast when they didn't let Frakes direct this last one, and the entire thing suffers for it.  Decent premise. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Nemisis has materialized.

I should note that it's been pretty completely spoiled for me, to the extent I remember what I've heard, and that it's highly unlikely that I'll like the Data story at all -I never ever like Data stories- or the Picard clone story when the clone isn't even Locutus.  I loathe the Borg, likewise Loc, but there's history there, and the villain would have been played by Patrick Stewart, automatically making the movie 10x better...

Not sure how soon I'll get to it - I think we're going to go early vote shortly, and that's on top of already having woken up dead this morning.

[Unorthodox]

Nemisis has materialized.

I should note that it's been pretty completely spoiled for me, to the extent I remember what I've heard, and that it's highly unlikely that I'll like the Data story at all -I never ever like Data stories- or the Picard clone story when the clone isn't even Locutus.  I loathe the Borg, likewise Loc, but there's history there, and the villain would have been played by Patrick Stewart, automatically making the movie 10x better...

Not sure how soon I'll get to it - I think we're going to go early vote shortly, and that's on top of already having woken up dead this morning.

It's what happens when you remove a director the actors love and replace him with a rather inexperienced one that doesn't even know the source material and then edit it to expand the action and remove any character points.   

Data story wasn't bad, but they should have used a different actor for B-4.  Just for any hope of continuing the story.  Data was showing AGE, which androids shouldn't after all. 

The evilcard story could have been salvaged, I think. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Try to not refresh my memory of what's been spoiled, please.  I should be able to discuss in depth soon...