copyright
Why there seems to be a case on CBS/Paramount vs. Axanar?
<p>Axanar is a fan made movie of Star Trek in preproduction, whose producers are being sued jointly by Paramount and CBS for copyright violation. When every news coverage article I found failed to question the applicability of copyright for the case, and <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/why-star-trek-fan-film-producers-should-have-seen-cbsparamount-lawsuit-coming/" rel="nofollow">at least one</a> implies the cause is lost for Axanar, I started to question my convictions on what copyright is for.</p>

<p>Part of me wants to believe that the move is just FUD on the part of the plaintiffs, and the lack of question on the case by the media is simply due to the lack of expert understanding on the Copyright law by people in general (who tends to bundle together every type of intellectual property law into a single mess). But now I am starting to doubt it.</p>

<p>Copyright law is very specific for what is protected, so, motion pictures are protected, but if no one is making verbatim copy of part or whole of the work without authors consent, there shouldn't be any copyright infringement, right?</p>

<p>I mean, fictitious organizations name, fictitious star system names, characters names, spaceship designs and general concepts falls out of scope of Copyright, is that correct? Maybe other IP laws, like trademark, can apply to theses things, but not copyright as I understand.</p>

<p>So, is my understand about copyright deeply flawed and there indeed any sound legal basis for the motion? How so?</p>

<p>You are probably correct that there is a conflation of trade mark and copyright in the reporting. However, copyright would still be a valid basis for the suit.</p>

<p>The Star Trek corpus is all covered by copyright including all of the artistic work such as the images of characters, starships, phasors etc. as well as the narrative including characterisation, organisational descriptions, narrative history etc. That is, anything that meets the copyright threshold of an artistic or literary work; names no, but names associated with a history and image, yes. </p>

<p>If you want to use <strong>any</strong> of that in your work then it is a derivative work and you need the copyright holder's permission. If you use <strong>none</strong> of that then you're good to go; but it isn't really Star Trek then, is it?</p>
