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.