So, John Eaves and Scott Schneider have explained on Facebook that for legal reasons, the Enterprise had to be redesigned to be 25%different to TOS. Incredibly it seems that DSC cannot use legacy designs.
That makes no sense. Unfortunately, the FB link you posted doesn't take me to a specific discussion, only to John Eaves' FB page in general. (And moreover to the mobile version of that page, which is annoying, as I browse these forums on a full-size monitor and it looks like crap there.) Can you (or anyone) perchance share a regular FB link to the specific discussion thread, or at least say what date it began so I can track it down on Eaves's page myself?
Read the comments further down.
Gabe koerner asks was the 25% mandate creative or legal.
Scott Schneider replies with one word 'legal'.
...
There are 186 comments on the page. Many of the people are saying this can't be so, CBS owns the rights to TOS designs and can use them if they want to. Both designers say that the copyright law is complicated and they only know that they are told to either completely redesign or change by 25% for legal reasons.
Yeah, the "many people" are right. The upshot is that the designers are not lawyers nor are they paid to be; they only know what they've been told. "Legal reasons" is a sweeping and generic statement that could mean any of a zillion things about which we can only speculate, including possibly some executive just making it up because he didn't want to have to explain his decisions.
The fact is, CBS owns the rights to the TOS
Enterprise, and can use it any way it damn well pleases. It demonstrably has done so on countless occasions, on TV (in TNG, DS9, ENT, and TOS-R) and in a metric ton of licensed products of every imaginable kind. At
most it might have to pay someone a fee for certain usages, depending on certain rights assigned under some specific contract, but even that is unlikely. (Matt Jefferies' estate doesn't own any part of the ship's design (or any other work he did for TOS), speculation to the contrary notwithstanding; it was all work for hire.)
A further fact is that the whole statement is ridiculous, because there is no empirical metric for determining the quantitative difference between one version and another of a design like this in order to
measure "25%." It's a completely subjective thing. One person might think this ship (or the TMP version, or the ST09 version, or Gabe Koerner's version, or any other variant) looks 98% like the original, and another that it looks only 50% like the original, and both could put up their arguments, and there is no decisive way to
settle those arguments, in a court of law or otherwise, because there is no established way to quantify the features of a visual design.
Notwithstanding that, speaking as an attorney and knowing how they work, I could totally see some desk jockey in the CBS legal department who knows all about merchandising contracts and nothing about design spitballing to someone in production along lines like "well, if you make it, say, 25% different, then we could probably justify charging licensees a separate fee for doing products depicting '
Discovery's
Enterprise' as opposed to 'the original
Enterprise,' and then we'd have a whole additional revenue stream." And such a notion could then get passed through the pipeline as a production mandate for "legal reasons." This is completely speculative, but it's at least plausible.
My guess is that the "25% difference" is so the licensees can't make merchandise of the Discoprise under a TOS license (or, alternatively, if they want to make a Discoprise, they can do it under a DSC license without also getting a TOS license). I don't think I've seen any models or posters or whatnot of the TOS design with ENT or DS9 branding.
Yeah. Basically this.
Here are some of the differences between John's design and the final episode design...
What was the source for the bit you box-quoted? I'm particularly curious because of its mention of two deflector antennae, which neither version of the ship actually has.
OK, I've read the Facebook thread now. And a comment from one Dave Combe jumped out at me:
"Gabe [Koerner] has a point when saying CBS are free to pump out models of [the TOS Enterprise] for Toys, comics and games etc, but when it comes to a TV show it's out of the question.
That leaves me to assume its someone not playing ball. ...
IOW, do we have JJ Abrams to thank for the forced visual reboot of the pre-TOS universe?
Gabe isn't a lawyer either (AFAIK), and this particular speculation doesn't really sound likely (although it's not completely impossible). Abrams' big objection after ST09 was that CBS was continuing to promote, license, and merchandise TOS stuff, separate and distinct from promoting, licensing, and merchandising his version (which was legit as well, of course, but different in that he had a piece of it through Bad Robot's contract, or so I've read). He complained that this created "brand confusion" (IOW, the brand owners declined to let his version dominate the market... imagine that). That much more-or-less dovetails with your paraphrase above, although I have no idea whether the dispute had anything to do with any production delays on STID.
However, where it goes astray is the "I'm going to assume" part. Nothing about the above suggests that Bad Robot's contract to make those films involved CBS signing over any kind of exclusive rights to use TOS designs (or characters or concepts), much less anything based upon them. If it did, then somebody in CBS legal agreed to sign away much more than necessary, and/or someone in Bad Robot legal agreed to pay for way more than necessary, neither of which seems likely, as neither company is full of stupidly incompetent people.
After all, Abrams
didn't use any TOS designs, nor plan to... nor did he even
begin to produce any TV projects, and if he had done so they would have used the films' own designs, not the originals. For that matter, DSC is a television project that conspicuously
has used TOS designs (the phaser and communicator, at the very least) and characters (Sarek, who also appeared in the films), and certainly lots of concepts, without any reports of legal conflicts arising.
And even if such a contract provision
did exist, the most CBS would have to do is pay Bad Robot some sort of contractually mandated fee. If somebody chose to do a redesign rather than pay such a fee, it's because somebody thought it was cheaper, not because it was legally necessary.
Here are couple a comments on the design
Scott Schneider - "...We had straight pylons. We never considered the swept because we felt it would be jumping forward in time for one element. Having said that there are elements of the refit design that really should have been in the original such as an airlock/docking port. I also added hatches to the bottom of the saucer that slide open to reveal additional airlocks. These ... just make sense as a functioning ship. I like to approach things from the standpoint of practical application"
Well, it sounds like at least Schneider has a reasonable attitude about how to approach the look of the ship, not unlike Jefferies' own approach back in the day. I'd love to know what the heck he thinks a "25% difference" in visual appearance actually
means, though.
Query (since, again, I can't find the original): if they "never considered" changing the pylons on their own, even after they'd started revising the ship, where exactly did the mandate for that particular alteration come from?...
