CBS/Paramount sues to stop Axanar

[oswriter]

Assuming he gets permission to appeal. That depends on the judgment and whether or not there is a point of law on which to argue further.

Why would he need permission? Appeals of final judgments to the Courts of Appeals (i.e., the 9th Circuit) are by right in the US. Permission would only be required for a further appeal beyond the 9th Circuit to the Supreme Court (which is unlikely in this case).

 

[Tom]

Do we know of any donors that high up the spending ladder? I would love to know how they feel about things.

Yes there are from the amounts I quoted and possibly more. I know of one donor who donated 5 digits, that was supposed to have a guest spot in the film and was pretty devastated by this whole thing. I must respect their privacy so I cant give out any other info than that. You don't get to 1.4 million in crowd funding with out some 5 digit donors.

 

[JD]

Well, if he fails to deliver on the project then it's breach of contract and in theory they'd be entitled to sue. The bigger donors should try and band together for a class action, which in turn would make it easier for the smaller donors to have a shot at getting some money. Obviously, as a matter or practical reality it would only ne worthy it if Peters comes out of all of this still with money (unless they want to bankrupt him).

Would the fact that Peters was sued to stop the film, and that he specifically mentioned this as possibility protect him from being sued by donors?

 

[Tom]

Well, if he fails to deliver on the project then it's breach of contract and in theory they'd be entitled to sue. The bigger donors should try and band together for a class action, which in turn would make it easier for the smaller donors to have a shot at getting some money. Obviously, as a matter or practical reality it would only ne worthy it if Peters comes out of all of this still with money (unless they want to bankrupt him).

Thing with that is Peters will say it's Cbs's fault the film was not made, which is hard to get around in court unless there is absolute public documented proof that Alec spent on the money on personal items. Even with that, it would still be hard to say he would not of got the film made if CBS did not sue him.

 

[Smoked Salmon]

Thing with that is Peters will say it's Cbs's fault the film was not made, which is hard to get around in court unless there is absolute public documented proof that Alec spent on the money on personal items. Even with that, it would still be hard to say he would not of got the film made if CBS did not sue him.

He has a contract with his donors. If fails to deliver the film he has breached it and they are entitled to a refund, not least because he held himself out as having permission to make the thing by agreeing to the crowdfunding terms of service, the platform on which he advertised himself.

 

[Tom]

What Peters should have done last year when presented with the lawsuit is this:

- Immediately suspend all work on the production and any spending of donor money.

- Put all Donor money in an escrow account and not touch a dime of it.

- Lay off any employees and volunteers until the lawsuit is resolved so you can protect them from possibly legal issues if they continue to work on Axanar. This includes RMB, Terry, Diana, everyone! (In other words, be a man and DON'T let others risk going down with you!)

- Tried to work out an Immediate settlement with CBS last January.

- If no settlement can be reached at that time, get legal counsel.

- After 2 months, break the lease and give up the studio so you are not paying monthly rent!! Also, obvious don't continue to put money into the studio! (Carpet anyone? )

- If after 3 to 4 months if there is still no resolution with CBS, return what you can of the donors money. He should have been able to return ALL of the Indiogogo donor money (if the money was frozen in escrow account in December), He obviously could not return the Kickstarter money since it was mostly all spent at the time of the lawsuit. However, if there was any of the money left he should have tried to pay the smaller Kickstarter donors back first, this would have reduced the overall amount of donors he would have to owe.

I think if he would of taken these steps with would have been a lot better for him.

 

[Tom]

He has a contract with his donors. If fails to deliver the film he has breached it and they are entitled to a refund, not least because he held himself out as having permission to make the thing by agreeing to the crowdfunding terms of service, the platform on which he advertised himself.

Still, it's not going to be an easy sell in court, especially with some provisions in the Kickstarter and Indiegogo TOS wording. I would love to see the donors sue, just being realistic about some of the roadblocks that might come up.

 

[jespah]

4. For that matter, if CBS and Paramount had done nothing, Axanar probably would've imploded on its own by now. The lawsuit gave LFIM a built-in excuse for not completing the film.

....

Allowing Axnar to implode would still have set a precedent of tolerance. They were perfectly right to take a stand once an infringer went too far.....

Allowing the whole shooting match to go forward risks making the estoppel argument fly. JVC and CBS/Paramount could not do that.

 

[Smoked Salmon]

Allowing the whole shooting match to go forward risks making the estoppel argument fly. JVC and CBS/Paramount could not do that.

Quite.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It depicts what the characters say was about to become a war, long after the Axanar timeframe, and doesn't mention any past war. Kor says, "A shame, Captain. It would have been glorious." No actual state of war existed yet, despite a number of incidents, and the Organians prevented one from happening.

The Organians prevented their fleets from engaging, but not the state of war.

Kirk speaks in the teaser of having gotten a war that they didn't want: "Well, there it is. War. We didn't want it, but we've got it."

Kor says it is war: "I respect you, Captain, but this is war, a game we Klingons play to win."

And Ayelborne speaks of stopping the war in progress at the episode's climax: "It is no trick, Commander. We have simply put an end to your war."

It was only the Organians' incorporeal nature that prevented them from being innocent casualties of the war; otherwise some of them would have been casualties.

But, whatever semantics we might or might not agree on, of course, that brief war without major engagement couldn't possibly be any war with respect to the issues in question regarding Axanar.

 

[carlosp]

AxaMonitor marks the Axanar copyright lawsuit's one-year anniversary with an Illustrated Guide to the coming courtroom antics! Available now in:

• screen resolution PDF (10 MB)
• e-reader compatible ePub (2.5 MB)
• high-resolution printable PDF (30 MB). Excerpts:

 

[urbandefault]

Thing with that is Peters will say it's Cbs's fault the film was not made, which is hard to get around in court unless there is absolute public documented proof that Alec spent on the money on personal items. Even with that, it would still be hard to say he would not of got the film made if CBS did not sue him.

There was never an injunction, so AP could have gone ahead and made the movie--if he hadn't pissed all the money away.

 

[MikeH92467]

Assuming he gets permission to appeal. That depends on the judgment and whether or not there is a point of law on which to argue further.

Are you talking about "permission" from Winston & Strawn? As was mentioned upthread you can appeal anything under our system. My non-expert understanding is that just about any judge's ruling anywhere along the line could be grounds for an appeal, although there certainly is no guarantee that the appeal court would give them the time of day. I would think W&S would consider appealing if they think there is a possibility of a favorable ruling on some point that they are trying to make, but at this point, my guess is that they would just wish AP good luck and tell him he is free to seek other counsel.

 

[OtherGene]

Yes there are from the amounts I quoted and possibly more. I know of one donor who donated 5 digits, that was supposed to have a guest spot in the film and was pretty devastated by this whole thing. I must respect their privacy so I cant give out any other info than that. You don't get to 1.4 million in crowd funding with out some 5 digit donors.

I can only imagine the frustration they felt seeing Peters and his disgusting horde of parasites living the good life with donor money safely in their wallets.

The lawsuit was the best thing that ever happened to Alec Peters, it provided him with an excuse to never fulfill his obligations and instead play the victim forever.

And those guys that left the shelter of Axanar and became, in some peoples eyes, somewhat heroic for doing so (!) you're as bad as your old friends, you only left because you realised you were never going to get as big a share of other peoples money as you felt you "deserved".

 

[jespah]

Well, in order to appeal, you need to have a question of law. Would anyone once the dust settles?

Eh, maybe. Because fair use and transformative use are kinda unsettled, that might be the hook where the hat is hung (there's a strained metaphor, eh?). But just because an area of the law isn't perfectly settled (spoiler alert: pretty much no area of the law is 100% unsettled, except maybe murder in the first), does not mean a trial would end with an appealable legal question/controversy.

It's also a matter of what the agreement is with W & S. While they might have originally wanted this one for appeals and press and maybe to make some sort of a point, it's gone on for a while and it's gotten expensive in terms of time. So we'll see what they do. W & S might make a business decision to fork over the appeal (if it happens) to another firm.

 

[carlosp]

Well, in order to appeal, you need to have a question of law. Would anyone once the dust settles?

Eh, maybe. Because fair use and transformative use are kinda unsettled, that might be the hook where the hat is hung (there's a strained metaphor, eh?). But just because an area of the law isn't perfectly settled (spoiler alert: pretty much no area of the law is 100% unsettled, except maybe murder in the first), does not mean a trial would end with an appealable legal question/controversy.

It's also a matter of what the agreement is with W & S. While they might have originally wanted this one for appeals and press and maybe to make some sort of a point, it's gone on for a while and it's gotten expensive in terms of time. So we'll see what they do. W & S might make a business decision to fork over the appeal (if it happens) to another firm.

Alec Peters clearly is prepared to lose at the district court level, as he indicated in his bizarre Second Life interview in September.

He's also clearly counting on Winston continuing to represent him, as he's recently begun citing Erin Ranahan's supposed 5-0 record on appeals to the Ninth Circuit.

 

[jespah]

Alec Peters clearly is prepared to lose at the district court level, as he indicated in his bizarre Second Life interview in September.

He's also clearly counting on Winston continuing to represent him, as he's recently begun citing Erin Ranahan's supposed 5-0 record on appeals to the Ninth Circuit.

Well, W & S might have something to say about that.

And I find such records amusing. They generally have more to do with the kinds of cases a firm takes than a lawyer's skill (although that does come into play and I'm not slamming Ms. Ranahan). E. g. if I take a rear ender case (and I've got the driver who was in the lead car, the one that was rear-ended), then I'm over 90% guaranteed to win at trial. And, in fact, the judge would yell at the litigants throughout discovery, big time, because such a case would be so clear-cut and so obvious. The only question would be damages, and at least in NY (and in a lot of other states), the property damage would be no-fault. All we would have to decide on would be the injuries, if any, and that's the sort of stuff handled by insurance adjusters. If such a case ended up at the appellate level, then the judges would be in danger of bursting blood vessels in their fury at such a blatant waste o' time.

Hence a good record (and who's to say if she might have peers who have 'worse' records but have appeared in front of the Ninth Circuit many more times? Which is better, to be 5-0, or 45-5? I would argue the latter, big time) might be a function of taking less ambitious cases. Dunno - but the raw numbers can deceive without anything to explain them.

 

[Squiggy]

Can a lawyer-by-practice fire their client or void a previous agreement to represent them if the first trial is so one sided and winds up in a massive win by the other party?

Par example: Peters gets his ass handed to him by the upcoming trial because (oh noes) 90% of the jurors can't tell the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, much less Star Trek and Axanar. CBS wins hands down and gets everything they want. Alec could appeal because, why not? He hasn't had to spend much up to now.

But W&S see how doomed the appeal would be and back out.

 

[Noname Given]

Well, in order to appeal, you need to have a question of law. Would anyone once the dust settles?

Eh, maybe. Because fair use and transformative use are kinda unsettled, that might be the hook where the hat is hung (there's a strained metaphor, eh?). But just because an area of the law isn't perfectly settled (spoiler alert: pretty much no area of the law is 100% unsettled, except maybe murder in the first), does not mean a trial would end with an appealable legal question/controversy.

It's also a matter of what the agreement is with W & S. While they might have originally wanted this one for appeals and press and maybe to make some sort of a point, it's gone on for a while and it's gotten expensive in terms of time. So we'll see what they do. W & S might make a business decision to fork over the appeal (if it happens) to another firm.

They'll appeal based on Judge Klausner's conduct in the case. You know as well as I that all they need to appeal is to say :

"Judge Klausner denied X or allowed Y when he clearly shouldn't have; and as a result, my client did not receive a fair adjudication of this matter..."

Whether or not W&S continue to represent Axanar/Alec Peters is irrelevant as to whether he'll appeal. I say this because I never thought that any law firm that looked at this situation would line up to represent Mr. Peters pro bono in the first place - or think they had a 'winnable/able to get a positive settlement for the defendant' type of case here. If he could find a lawfirm l;ike W&S to take the case; I'm sure he'll be able to find/get another to handle the appeal (assuming he looses of course as the case hasn't gotten to the verdict/damages phase yet.)

maybe he'll find some firm who somehow thinks there's a chance the Ninth Circuit would use this to make a statement regarding copyright. Asd liberal as the Ninth Circuit is - I don't think even they would go so far as to use this case for something like that. but I'm sure there's some loons who might think so.

 

[jespah]

...

maybe he'll find some firm who somehow thinks there's a chance the Ninth Circuit would use this to make a statement regarding copyright. Asd liberal as the Ninth Circuit is - I don't think even they would go so far as to use this case for something like that. but I'm sure there's some loons who might think so.

It might be a push by Libertarians, actually.