UK Media TV SF Star Trek
UK Media TV SF Star Trek
Ali and Dave Hopkins (fn62@dial.pipex.com) wrote:
Sorry to anyone who has seen this before, but I thought it might be
interesting....
Ok There has been a MAJOR development in Trek that will effect us all on
the Internet. The article below best describes what is happening. Some
of you have contacted me. The decision is for you to make. However, from
what I have heard. It is NOT RICK BERMAN or any of the production staff
initiating this action. Please do not get this confused. I'm not defending
this action, but please place blame where blame is due. Rick Berman and
the Trek production crew are employees are of Paramount/Viacom. Their
paychecks come from Paramount. It is not their fault
Some of your want to take action. Some groups are rallying to write a
lettter campaign against the show's advertisers and hitting Paramount in
the pocket. Consider the ramifications of any action your choose to take.
Organize your efforts, but in a sensible manner, not as crazed fans.
No one will hear you if you shout, but if you speak quietly with
conviction, you stand a better chance to be heard. Past Trek
campaigns have worked in the past, but with organization. Everyone was goal
oriented. Do not bicker among one another.
I have included a page where individuals wishing to join the cause can get
more information.
I do not know how this campaign by Paramount will effect Warp 10.
I do not know if I am a target or future target or if the mailing lists
are future list are future targets. Your guess is as good as mine. Deal
with the facts not rumors.
I have also included a posting from the creator of Babylon 5 on the
subject matter that may be a possible option you all might consider and
make all parties happy.
I'll keep everyone posted.
Thanks Again,
Ruben
Paramount Locks Phasers on Trek
Fan Sites
by Steve Silberman
Star Trek fans who create unofficial Trek Web sites have
more to worry about this week than warp-core breaches
and assimilation by the Borg. In a letter mailed 13
December to Jeff Rhind, webmaster of Loskene's Tholian
Web, Paramount counsel demanded that Rhind remove all
copyrighted Trek-related materials from his site within 10
days, or face legal action. Similar letters were posted to
other fans and fans' ISPs, which beamed sites like Tony
Gelskey's Star Trek Universe, and Michael Brown's Vidiot
homepage, offline.
With franchise owner Paramount coming down hard on
unauthorized sites after the 10 December launch of the
official Trek site, Continuum, on the Microsoft Network,
some fans see a plot to drive traffic to the pay-to-play MSN
site. Paramount spokeswoman Susan Duffy insists that the
firm's stance toward the unparalleled Trek fan culture on
the Net (encompassing more than 53 Trek-related
newsgroups, and more than 100,000 Web sites) has not
changed. "Our policy has always been to protect our
copyrights from infringement," says Duffy.
The materials the letter defines as infringing include "full
scripts or excerpts therefrom ... detailed summaries of the
works ... photographs, artistic renditions of Star
Trekcharacters, or other properties ... images, sound
bites, and video." Though the letter states that Paramount
"does not, of course, object to all materials posted on the
Internet relating to the STAR TREK Properties," fans fear
that Paramount's trademarking of the Trek characters'
names and the words "Star Trek" risks making any posting
of plot summaries or reviews into unauthorized use of
copyrighted materials.
"Paramount is really overreacting," says Brown, whose
own site had been used in the past by Paramount staffers
to gather trivia from fans for a 30th anniversary broadcast
on UPN. Brown hopes Paramount can continue to work
with fans to mutual benefit, because "the whole idea of the
sites is to promote the franchise."
Brown has seen the open-access First Contact site on
MSN, and he's not impressed. "I thought the interface was
very inconvenient. It was hard to get around. The site
wasn't as user-friendly as a fan site would be," claims
Brown, a Unix systems administrator who sees
Paramount's move against the unofficial sites as "biting
the hand that feeds them."
Steve Krutzler - a high-school student in Florida who
designed two popular fan outposts, TrekWeb.com and a
First Contact site - says the "super-dedicated fan base"
online will organize to fight suppression of unauthorized
sites. "If they're not going to back down, and we have to
make the ratings fall," Krutzler vows, "we will."
Many of the fan pages indexed on meta-sites like the Star
Trek Nexus make liberal use of the materials mentioned in
the letter. The situation is ethically complicated by the fact
that, unlike the unofficial Millennium sites that faced a
similar shutdown campaign by the Fox Network in October
- a few of the Trek fan sites turn hit counts into ad revenue,
in pay or barter. (Krutzler's First Contact site, for example,
bears not only Trek insignia, but a banner for Riddler.com.)
The majority of fan pages, however, do link to the official
sites, and many carry unofficial credit lines.
Though stripping all the Federation-class images and .wav
files from many sites would leave them drier than Mars, the
Web is only the tip of the Trek iceberg. There's an entire
genre of gay and lesbian fan fiction online called "K/S,"
detailing romantic involvements between Captain Kirk and
Mr. Spock. The alt.startrek.creative archive contains more
than 100 Mbytes of stories, poems, and songs, housed in
11 directories, from "adult" to "tech."
To netwatcher Misha Glouberman, who maintains a site
called Trademark Wars on the Web, the flourishing of
online fan-dom - and the recent efforts by Paramount, Fox,
and others to police fan sites - points to a sea change in
cultural dynamics.
"What we're seeing on the Net is popular culture becoming
something that people participate in, instead of passively
absorb," observes Glouberman. "People are expressing
their own creativity through these icons, and these
copyright skirmishes are undoing the progress ... claiming
trademark infringement is a back door into censorship that
wouldn't otherwise be allowable. There's been a lot of
noise made in the last year about the threat of censorship
by the government. We need to keep our eye on
censorship by large corporations in the name of protecting
copyrights."
Copyright © 1993-96 Wired Ventures, Inc. and affiliated companies.
All rights reserved.
_______________________
From from one of our members Geoff Shang. Thanks Geoff!!
Don't know if you've seen any of this about the Viacom/paramount
crack-down on fan-run web sites. For more info, Mike Brown's 
Vidiot
is a good starting place, with a GIF of the letter and pointers to other
threatened sites. Also, here's an article from Wired on the subject. Sorry
about the lynx-isms that I've left in, you can remove them if you'd prefer.
__________________________
From one of our members, Wayne. Thanks Wayne
Viacom has recently begun shutting down Star Trek Fan pages, and
has now gone so far as to say that all pictures, sounds (computer sound
effects, etc.), ARTISTIC RENDITIONS, video clips etc. are no longer
permitted on public web sites.
Please help with the protest by visiting these sites:
STFCwrath
STUniverse
_________________________
From the Babylon 5 mailing list on the Viacom matter. JMS is Joe
Stranysksi, the creator and executive producer of Babylon 5. A
viewer's question is first, then Joe's reponse:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: BFrost@exch.reedtool.com (Brian Frost)
You may or may not be aware that Viacom is trying to shutdown any
Web site that does more than provide discussion of Star Trek.
Seems to me that they are going to shoot themselves in the foot.
The fans are what has given Star Trek life over these many years.
Would you or WB consider taking such action against Fan
maintained B5 sites? I maintain a page for Houston B5 viewers and this would
most definitely affect the layout of my page.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Actually, WB and I have already had discussions about this (along
with John C. and others in B5 production). What we proposed, because
of the unique relationship between us and the online community, was that
WB *not* go after the fan web pages AS LONG AS they attached the proper
copyright info to any graphics or other material that's owned by WB. This
prevents the material from falling into the public domain, which is the
main concern here. (Most folks don't know that you can lose your
copyright if you do not make best, concerted efforts to defend it.)
It's a sane and sensible policy, and thus far it seems to be working.
jms
Below is a text document from an attorney who answers a few
questions re: copyright law as regards certain fansites and
"fair-use" doctrine. PLEASE READ if you maintain a website with
archives or fanfic!!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: To all you who rage against Paramount
From: judygran@aol.com (Judygran)
Date: 16 Dec 1996 20:00:18 GMT
Message-ID: <19961216195900.OAA18189@ladder01.news.aol.com>
John Birt asked for legal information about fan's rights vs. Paramount's
rights. Here is something I wrote for a K/S newsletter a year and a half ago.
Judith Gran
(a Philadelphia lawyer)
*******************************************************
Under the principles of "fair use" as interpreted by the courts,
non-commercial uses of copyrighted materials, especially those that do not
copy the work literally but transform it to make a new creative work,
generally have been held to be non-infringing. Indeed, in Sony Corporation
of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 451, 456 (1984), the
U.S. Supreme Court held explicitly that a noncommercial use is
"presumptively" fair. The presumption of fairness for noncommercial uses
means that unless the copyright owner can prove that "the particular use
is harmful, or that if it should become widespread, it would adversely
affect the potential market for the copyrighted work," a court cannot find
infringement. The "fair use" doctrine is not by any means limited to uses of
copyrighted material for educational, scientific or research purposes;
many uses for pure entertainment have been found "fair" by the courts.
Each case must be judged on its own merits and evaluated according to the
four statutory "fair use" factors:
1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such
use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational
purposes;
2) The nature of the copyrighted work;
3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation
to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value or
the copyrighted work. 17 U.S.C. 107.
In Sony, in which the Court found that noncommercial home
videotaping ("timeshifting") was fair (the precise holding in that case
was that Sony was not liable for contributory infringement since the Sony
Betamax was capable of substantial non-infringing use), the Court also
stated that a commercial use would be presumptively unfair. Recently,
however, the Court retracted that statement--or rather explained it away,
since it was only dicta, not the "law of the case"--in Luther Campbell,
aka Luke Skyywalker [sic] v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 114 S.Ct. 1164
(1994), in which the Court held that 2 Live Crew's parody of "Oh Pretty
Woman" was a fair use despite its plainly commercial nature. Campbell is
by far the Court's most comprehensive explication of the "fair use"
doctrine to date, and I strongly commend Justice David H. Souter's
literate and witty opinion in that case to anyone who is interested in the
"fair use" doctrine and how it might apply to fan fiction. I'll send a
copy to anyone who asks. (The opinion strengthens the increasingly
positive impression of Justice Souter I've formed over the years; just
shows that a friend of Christa McAuliffe's husband can't be all bad.)
Under the Supreme Court's interpretation of "fair use" in
Campbell, I'd feel very comfortable defending K/S fan fiction as a fair
use of Star Trek. Applying each of the statutory fair use factors to K/S,
as the Court analyzed them and explained the relationship among them:
1) The nature of the use. A work that "transforms" the original
and adds something new with a "further purpose, meaning or character"
is more likely to be fair than a work that merely "supersedes" or
"supplants" the original. Clearly, the essence of fan fiction is a
transformative use of Star Trek; fan fiction does not borrow from
Star Trek merely to avoid "drudgery." Noncommercial fan fiction also
carries a presumption of fairness.
2) The nature of the copyrighted work. This factor recognizes that
creative works "tend to be closer to the core of copyright protection"
than factual works. As does parody, fan fiction borrows from publicly
known, expressive works by its very nature. Thus this factor is probably
"not much help" in this case, as Justice Souter observed it was not in
Campbell. Fans must consume the original in order to write fan fiction.
3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used. The
fundamental question here is not the amount of copying in a purely
quantitative sense, but the nature of the copying. Is it the kind of
copying that reveals a dearth of "transformative" character? Is it the
kind of copying that enables the new work to serve as a market
substitute for the original or potentially licensed derivatives?
For K/S fan fiction, the answer to both question is clearly "no."
4) The effect upon the market for the original (and licensed
derivatives). This factor requires courts to consider, not just the
extent of market harm caused by the particular actions of the alleged
infringer, but also "whether unrestricted and widespread conduct of the
sort engaged in by the defendant ... would result in a substantially
adverse impact on the potential market" for the original.
NIMMER ON COPYRIGHT 13.05[A][4], p. 13-102.61.
The Court in Campbell recognized that a "transformative"
work is likely to serve a different market from the original because,
unlike a verbatim copy, it does not serve the same function as the
original. Given the evidentiary presumption in favor of fairness for a
noncommercial use, the copyright owner must prove harm to the market for
the original; it's not enough to speculate that such harm will occur.
If Paramount were to sue a K/S fanzine publisher, I believe the
fundamental issue to be tried would be the effect of K/S zines on the
market for licensed Star Trek products and spinoffs such as
commercially-published novels and new TV series and films. If I were
representing the zine publisher (I tend to approach legal issues as a
litigator, since that's what I do in mundane life), I would try to
prove that:
(a) In almost thirty years of unrestricted, unregulated fanzine
publishing, Star Trek fanzines have never commanded a market of more
than a few thousand purchasers. For K/S zines, the figures are much
lower. Because of the tiny market for K/S fan fiction, the copyright
owner will never decide to license it even if for some unlikely reason
Paramount wanted to get into the slash business. Further, even if each
K/S zine sold represented the loss of a sale to Paramount, the market
harm would be de minimis.
(b) The sale of zines does not, in fact, result in loss of sales of
licensed Star Trek products. Purchasers of K/S zines invest heavily in
commercial Star Trek products, e.g. videos, novels, T-shirts, posters
and multiple viewings of the films. In addition, K/S fan fiction
brings fans together at conventions, where they become a captive market
for licensed products.
(c) K/S fan fiction keeps alive its readers' interest in Star Trek and
its progeny, rather than the opposite. I'd present systematic evidence
to prove the above, including surveys showing K/S fans' actual
purchasing practices as compared to scientifically-chosen control groups
from the markets identified by the copyright owners and licensees as
targets for their products. Since it's unlikely that the copyright
owner could produce evidence of market harm, I'd feel comfortable about
our chances of success.
Although since Campbell there is no hard and fast presumption of
"unfairness" against a commercial use, if I were a zine publisher
concerned about the legal status of my publications, I'd keep my fanac
nonprofit to stay on the safe side. Incidentally, it's worth remembering
that the only zine that Paramount ever threatened to sue for copyright
infringement was the genzine Dreadnought Explorations, which Paramount
went after because of its similarity to commercially- licensed professional
fiction. When I was a law student, I spoke to Bruce Hosmer,
the attorney handling Star Trek products for Gulf & Western, about this
issue and he told me that DE was ordered to cease and desist because the
photograph of the Enterprise on the cover suggested to the reader that
this was an "official" Star Trek product. Mr. Hosmer also stated that he
thought it was possible for a fanzine to be a "fair use," though
understandably as the representative of the copyright owner he took a
fairly restrictive view of the type of zine he considered "fair." Under
his standard, though, I'd have to say that an a/u zine set in pre-Reform
Vulcan, in which the characters are long-haired warriors and love slaves
and may even have different names, has a certain claim to "fairness" ...
but I'm not about to say anything here that will discourage good,
"realistic" K/S. I don't think I need to, though, since in my opinion all
nonprofit K/S fiction qualifies as "fair use."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Again, here are some constructive things that can be done:
1. E-mail the culprits. DS9 fans may submit their protests by e-mail
to UPN/Paramount's comm channel web site: click COMM CHANNEL and fill in the
comments section and press the "submit" button.
VOY fans may submit their protests directly to
voyager@paramount.com
The lines *have* been clogged due to a veritable flood of protests.
You are overseas and hence awake at hours most Americans are
sleeping, you might give them a good run for their money by
clogging the hours they expect a bit of respite! :-)
2. Write letters. Ask your trek friends to write letters. The addresses are:
Mallory D. Levitt Rick Berman, Producer
Viacom, Inc Paramount Pictures/Hart Bldg #105
1515 Broadway 5555 Melrose Avenue
New York, Loas Angeles
NY 10036-5794 CA 90038-3197
AGAIN - Our only advantage is our numbers and our unity.
Remember IDIC and LLAP.
Yours in Trek --
(-{-)* JudithDS9er...
**header address altered against SPAM**
-------------------------------------------------------
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech
censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied,
chains us all irrevocably."
- Jean-Luc Picard, "The Drumhead"
*******************************
"There is more to life than the rule of law!"
- Odo, "Things Past"
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