Would it be better to create something new?

This post was inspired by discussions between supporters and detractors of "Axanar".

Would the supporters of Axanar contend with a completely new military science fiction / science fantasy movie or series about peaceful exploration of space?

Option #1 for a future project with commercial elements:

Books with military science fiction and exploration of space are legion, and a lot of it is also pulp fiction.

Would it be more interesting to properly license and create a basic production off one or more pulp fiction titles with space exploration?

Comparatively, if Alec Peters (or someone else) went forward with this idea, then their production would have just as non-professional trappings, but without the lawsuits.

Would it be better to peruse sci-fi works that have entered into the Public Domain, and whereby copyright is no longer enforceable?

Licensing existing works might not be cheap, but anything that is well-known to have become Public Domain from a long-dead author should be fair game, IMO.

Option #2 would be a completely new show with its own brand and stories.

Unlike with Star Trek, the new show's very permissive licensing rules would ensure, that everyone would be welcome to make their own fan productions under that brand: new species, new planets, etc.

Creative Commons licenses allow one to choose between commercial / non-commercial reuse, whether the derivative must have the same license, and so on. Attribution would probably be compulsory.

There is strong merit in the philosophy of the GNU GPL license in free software: If you make changes, you have to give back to the community. Other permissive licenses also exist.

The new project would have to avoid all the branding and other optics similar to anything else in science fiction, so that Paramount/CBS or anyone else would not need to sue. All of the costumes, sets, prosthetics, ship designs, species, and terminology would have to be different.

Would that instead be more rewarding?

CBS, Star Trek, and Axanar

This is in reply to a YouTube comment poster, who was dismayed, that the CBS vs Axanar lawsuit was settled.

These lawsuits are done to avoid both brand dilution and to prevent misappropriation of intellectual property.

The brand of a franchise is an important part of that intellectual property.

Around 1997/1998, when Paramount had gone after amateur websites that hosted Trek content without permission, Jonathan Frakes gave an interview to Yahoo! Internet Life, wherein he said, that when he leaves the Star Trek set, then he can take his beard with him, but not the costumes, pointing out who owns what content.

The Axanar case is unfortunate, because on one hand, the Axanar people wanted to make a great fan film, but on the other hand, CBS saw, that someone was raking in money for it through crowdfunding. Were CBS to allow that to continue, a larger production (fan, "fan", or otherwise) would have eventually felt it permissible to do so, too. And that would be quite a can of worms.

The interesting part is, that Axanar had begun to appear much better than what Paramount and CBS had been doing so far. Some fans detest JJ-Trek, and others savaged the new Discovery ship shown in a Comic-Con preview clip (I like it, btw).

If I were a pointy-haired boss at CBS, I'd see a better-looking fan film as a threat to my properties, especially at a time of one 'Trek project being in pre-production; all of which is not cheap.

From the corporate point of view, a competing fan production would potentially devalue the existing project and affect its ratings after episodes were published, because (die-hard) fans would begin to compare Axanar to Discovery, especially, if Axanar looked better.

That Axanar looked better, guaranteed bad optics when coming down with a lawsuit on Axanar people, but CBS were not in a position to make a different move.

The copyright and brand protection issues were still pertinent, and to me, it seems, CBS found themselves between a rock and a hard place, just as they were about to get busy with Discovery.

Because on one hand, CBS had to protect the Star Trek brand, and on the other hand, they had to avoid alienating fans.

Therefore, the only way to avoid a worse situation, was to settle the lawsuit.

And so, CBS now have a very tough job of making Discovery twice as better.

Climate change and acceptance of science

I decided (yet again) to save a reply I'd written in a discussion under a YouTube video clip an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine about a group of genetically modified geniuses. Three of them geniuses arrive on the station, and make startling long-term analyses about the Dominion War. The analyses are complex and also correct.

One of the YouTube commenters then asked, if the writers had in mind the climate scientists, their predictions, and how many people in the public — even decisionmakers — would dismiss these scientific conclusions.

My response was, that

The episode wasn't particularly on climate change, but about how ready the 'normal' people would be to accept accurate science, even if they did could not comprehend it.

For example, we are able and willing to use all kinds of gadgets despite the fact, that there is a huge amount of science behind them. We are able to take care of individual plants without knowing exactly how they work, but knowing, that they need sunlight, water, nutrients, and bees (for pollination).

What many people are unable to grasp wrt the climate of the Earth, is, that they fail to treat it as such a gadget or a plant that also needs care and maintenance, such as: 'Grow more plants' and 'exhaust less CO2 and other dangerous micromaterials'.

In many ways, the science fiction show "The Expanse" has a very accurate view of how the climate of the Earth might have progressed in the future. There, the icecaps of the Earth have melted quite a bit, and everything is swimming, with 30 (yes, thirty) billion people inhabiting the planet.