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CBS/Paramount sues to stop Axanar

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Reilly said:
However, the issue comes with then continuing to support a team with such a bad track record, even as they pretend that there's nothing wrong with blowing 7 figures and everything is great.
..............
(But then, he did just raise 22k for a studio that was clearly on its last legs....................... Regardless of anything else, he's still clearly one heck of a salesman).
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He is a truly gifted salesman.

Thinking in 'Star Trek' again I'm reminded of our Tuvok and Spock with their highly developed sense of logic. A wonderful thing, logic. Brings a perspective that the use of emotion alone does not provide.

I see analogy; both the gifted salesmen and the use of logic, each wonderful in its own right,...... also have their inherent flaws.

“You can use logic to justify just about anything." A gifted salesman can persuade belief in just about anything.

"that's [their] power........ and [their] flaw."
 
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Smoked Salmon said:
Not according to the Kickstarter terms, which holds Kickstarter out as an agency and states that any crowdfunding is a contractual relationship between the offerer of the project and the donating party. At the very least perks have to be fulfilled and the donating party is offering consideration on that basis. It's one of the reasons there needs to be more civil litigation relating to crowdfunding to set precedents and fully define the extent of that contractual relationship.
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Oh absolutely. Don't get me wrong I was commenting more on the reality of the situation. If I've learned one thing from this Axa-mess it's that their absolutely needs to be more legal controls and accountability put in place on crowdfunding.

Just the fact that they've been able to edit the crowdfunding page after its gone live is really an issue. Why should people taking donor's money be able to change the narrative like that? Surely that's what the updates are for?

I am glad to hear of some of the cases people cited, but there's obviously still some ways to go on this issue.
 
Kelso said:
There was no sign of Peters at Treklanta this year, and no mention of him during the fanfilm awards.

Axanar had a table, but I never once saw anyone manning it.
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I saw Alec on youtube posting about the arrival of his 53' trailer to Georgia The video no longer shows up as far as I can tell.
 
I haven't followed the details of this so I must ask: Why are CBS/Paramount so determined to crush the Axanar project? ist tis just some conflict about copyright and money or what?
 
Pretty much. Alec Peters crowdfunded a metric ass-ton of cash from enthusiastic fans and turned it into a for-profit venture of setting up a money-making studio, under the pretense of making a not-for-profit fan film based on source material from FASA's Trek RPG on the 4-Years War and the exploits of Captain Garth of Izar (from the TOS ep "Whom Gods Destroy") during the course of that conflict. It crossed a brilliant candy-red line that no other fan film had crossed, resulting in the lawsuit and highly restrictive guidelines under which C/P would ever allow one to be made in the future. Carlos can explain it far better than I am, but that's it in a nutshell.
 
Reilly said:
Just the fact that they've been able to edit the crowdfunding page after its gone live is really an issue. Why should people taking donor's money be able to change the narrative like that? Surely that's what the updates are for?
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noooo kidding

137th Gebirg said:
^^^ Why do I have the song from "Beverly Hillbillies" going through my head right now?
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He's driving away from the Hills, and the story of Axanar is BH backwards: move to BH, unexpectedly strike oil, live with little means. So it would in net play forward.

137th Gebirg said:
Pretty much. Alec Peters crowdfunded a metric ass-ton of cash from enthusiastic fans and turned it into a for-profit venture of setting up a money-making studio...
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Don't forget
a) multiple product sales (coffee, models, game pieces, books) done or in process of setting up, all without licensing anything, and even encouraging vendors and authors to work under pseudonyms/trust Axanar that it has the authorizations.

b) saying flat out in their annual report that they were paying themselves salaries from the donations which were based on CBS/Paramount IP value (even though Axanar a year later tried to say no that never happened because Alec's investments in net cancelled it out, as if emptying the cookie jar, empty cookie jar being found, putting back cookies constitutes 'never took')

c) asserting in many podcasts and in the fundraiser texts that they were creating "professional" Star Trek not "fan" Star Trek, without having a license to do so

and so on and so on, the list continues.

If the studios had allowed one for profit corporation to build a permanent for profit salaried competing studio by proposing they would make the IP 'better', they would have forfeited both future profits from the IP, and the right to defend themselves.

This wasn't about attacking a fan film AT ALL.
 
Oh, yes, quite correct. Those are all good additional examples of AP's fiduciary malfeasance. I lost track of all his shenanigans last year and just took a blind stab at a 1000-foot executive summary of the situation at hand. So many rabbit holes to crawl down with this one... :)
 
137th Gebirg said:
Oh, yes, quite correct. Those are all good additional examples of AP's fiduciary malfeasance. I lost track of all his shenanigans last year and just took a blind stab at a 1000-foot executive summary of the situation at hand. So many rabbit holes to crawl down with this one... :)
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And a good one which I hope answers the poster's question.

Axanar was wrapped in deflectors too:

1. 'operating as a nonprofit', 'applying for nonprofit status' - neither of these was true until only a few months ago. They had someone supposedly writing a nonprofit application back in 2015 they claimed in their own blogs, but they never filed. And they didn't have any of the operational framework of a nonprofit either, like resources in trust governed by a board, a nonprofit mission statement published, etc. It was for-profit operations to build a studio all the way. They repeatedly tried to get around this by saying they were 'operating as a nonprofit' because no money was left after they spent it all, largely on for-profit asset building and salaries.

2. 'we are doing what the donors want' - can't emphasize this enough. Just because you put out a Kickstarter saying you intend to build a studio and do 'professional' Trek, and donors give that money, it doesn't make it legal. But Axanar maintained all along that their mandate arose from "giving Trek fans what they want".

3. 'we are almost ready to shoot' - endlessly claimed, until pushed under oath, THEN saying 'we dont even have a script' and 'all the money was gone in early 2016' when forced to tell the truth or go to jail for perjury.
 
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This line from the J-Lane "Interview" stood out to me
ALEC – Well, we won’t be asking donors to cover our ongoing expenses. We’ve made some pretty significant operational changes, and I feel confident we’ll be able to generate enough cash flow to keep the doors open, the lights on, and the cameras rolling well into the future.
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Wonder what that means?
 
Jedman67 said:
flabbergasting.
http://fanfilmfactor.com/2017/04/27...he-new-atlanta-location-for-axanar-interview/
So if the sets won't be used after all, and all you needed was a greenscreen, why did it require $1.5 mil?
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Ignoring the conflict between the feature film and the now 2x15 minute episodes in the Prelude format they're going for, the silly thing gets me now is that common decency would suggest using the sets in some capacity. You've taken all that money and at this point they are literally the only thing to show for it.

Ok, they're not going to be heavily used, but the bridge could at least be used in some capacity in a flashback. We already had that short sequence of Sonja in Prelude. It'd be easy enough to film a similar sequence on the Ares bridge. They could easily break the documentary format and show the Battle of Axanar itself for 5 minutes (perhaps labelled as a "reconstruction" within the confines of the format). At least, that's what I'd do. Give fans a taste of the "best Trek ever" they were denied, just to prove it could've happened if not for that pesky lawsuit.
 
Lynx said:
I haven't followed the details of this so I must ask: Why are CBS/Paramount so determined to crush the Axanar project? ist tis just some conflict about copyright and money or what?
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Quite simply, Alec Peters is a con artist and coned fans out of 1.4 million dollars that has not to this day produced the promised product (The Axanar film). CBS was trying to put a stop to this, as rightfully they should.
 
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