No they don't. We are fans. We have no rights to any information about stuff like this. It would be nice to know but they don't have to tell us anything.
USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
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No they don't. We are fans. We have no rights to any information about stuff like this. It would be nice to know but they don't have to tell us anything.
Well, as far as what they "have" to do they can Star Trek into a monthly sitcom set in Kentucky as far as their "rights" are concerned.
But if they want to keep a fruitful connection to their fandom, they HAVE to step in and clear that shit up a bit. Soon.
That's inconceivable to me, unless a whole host of corporate entertainment lawyers who specialize in this stuff were all completely incompetent at their jobs.
Why? Are people going to stop watching just because they don't know who owns what piece of property? I just don't see that. That gets way too inside baseball and into an area most people just don't care about and probably don't want to really know about and likely wouldn't fully understand if it was explained.
IIRC, CBS and Paramount produced documentation (all available on the Axamonitor site) showing that they owned the Star Trek movies and TV series'.
Correct. They did. They own Star Trek. I don't think they got into specifics of who owned what becasue it wasn't relevant but collectively they owned it all.
It is certainly possible that certain royalties are owned by whoever designed the ship originaly. I doubt that is the case but it is possible.
Best example of something like that are the Daleks in Doctor Who that are not owned by the BBC. They can only use the Daleks even today with permission and licensing from the Terry Nation Estate.
Theoretically possible. You can own the copyright to something, but sell off the trademarks to someone else. (Superman's S symbol, for instance, is a trademark, completely distinct from Superman as a character.)
Not realistically possible, however. Viacom was not hurting for cash in 2005 (or ever — it's one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates on the planet), and it would be insane to sell something like that off piecemeal. Moreover, check the fine print on any Trek product released in the last few years, and you'll see text to the effect of "Star Trek and all related trademarks are the property of CBS Television Studios."
There are also occasional special cases like, as just mentioned, the rights to the Daleks in Doctor Who. However, if that were ever the situation with Trek designs, it would go all the way back to the mid-'60s (when the originals were created), not just to the 2005 corporate reorganization. Where Trek is concerned, there is no evidence that any such secondary rights ever existed. (E.g., as I mentioned upthread, Matt Jefferies created all his designs as "work-for-hire.")
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Well I don't think that's the case for the Enterprise anyways, because of all the products that have used the design since 2006.
My theory is they can't use the TOS design in a live action production for some unknown reason. They can still use it in merchandising though.
I don't think that is the case. It is possible? yes. Likely? no.
Well my comment applies to the designers as well.
Yup, it still seems liike me that a company man insisted, not for legal reasons (ie, they couldn't use TOS) but for the "legal" reason of being able to make a totally separate and new item to make money off of, by making it 25% different. The "Discovery" version / brand / logo.
Eaves and Schneider don't know. That much is clear. I guarantee you, the corporate lawyers at CBS do know. There's apparently some confusing game of telephone going on between point A and point B, though.
Definitely. Even when Superman enters the public domain (which should happen in 2033, absent some change in the law), the trademark will continue in perpetuity. IOW, people will legally be able to tell and sell new stories about Superman (just as they can today about, say, Sherlock Holmes), but they won't be able to illustrate them using the S-symbol (or the logo, or other iconography distinctive enough to be trademarked), not without paying a licensing fee.
This isn't the place for a seminar in property law; suffice it to say that "ownership" (of anything, not just IP but real estate or anything you care to name) isn't ever a simple, comprehensive, all-or-nothing concept. It's always about a bundle of rights. Those rights can be severed from one another. For instance, a simple example: f you rent an apartment, your landlord still owns the place, but for an agreed-upon amount of money he breaks off the right to live there and assigns that right to you for a specific period of time (and hence foregoes the right to do so himself).
Eaves seems to be somewhat cool with that. He has talked a lot about his ENT designs on Trekyards, and almost all of them were changed somewhat. He actually seems to somewhat encourage them to fiddle with his designs, since Eaves usually does not do full orthos. He does one or two angles and lets the vfx team fill in the blanks.
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