Star Trek fan film Axanar settles law suit with CBS and Paramount.
Kickstarter-funded fan film Prelude to Axanar has just settled their law suit brought against them by CBS and Paramount. The film is a mockocumentary going behind the Battle of Axanar, the first big military dust-off between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire.
The Axanar bods said:
“Axanar Productions is pleased to announce that we have reached a formal resolution to the lawsuit brought against Alec Peters, and the fan film production, AXANAR, by CBS Studios, Inc. and Paramount Pictures Corporation.
Since the beginning of the lawsuit, over a year ago, we have expressed our desire to address the concerns of the studios, and our willingness to make necessary changes, as long as we could reasonably meet our commitments to AXANAR’S over 14,000 donors, fans and supporters. We are now able to do exactly that.
Terms of the settlement agreement include an agreement to allow Axanar Productions to continue showing PRELUDE TO AXANAR commercial-free on YouTube and to allow Axanar Productions to produce the AXANAR feature film as two fifteen-minute segments that can be distributed on YouTube (also without ads).
Additional terms of the agreement will be made available to cast, crew and donors through private correspondence. For the next sixty days, Axanar Productions will be working through some final legal requirements requiring immediate attention. In addition, there are several pre-production issues that need to be re-visited before we can begin principal photography on our project.
Axanar Productions was created by lifelong Star Trek fans to celebrate their love for Star Trek. Alec Peters and the Axanar team look forward to continuing to share the Axanar story and are happy to work within the Guidelines for Fan Films for future projects. Throughout this process, we will continue communicating with our fans and backers to ensure they are informed and involved until we reach completion of the production.
For those of you who are donors, you will be receiving an email with some “donor exclusive” information. Thanks again for your support this past year. Live Long and Prosper.”
Basically, Axanar had to eat the stringent new fan film guidelines issued by CBS and Paramount, after the owners realised their much neglected franchise was likely to get some extra life beamed into it by the coming official new Trek TV series.
The legal case was all rather avoidable and could have been settled with a quiet word with the fans involved, followed by the issuing of the new guidelines, but we suspect that a visible example and the attendant free press coverage was needed to usher in the new stricter world order for things IP-related.
How long before Star Wars Disney issues similar guidelines? Any bets?
