TAS was able to tell good stories in 20-25 minutes which included quite a bit of filler. Why not 15 minutes?
To quote Vic Mignogna:
"We cannot tell our stories in fifteen minutes. You can't tell a Star Trek story in fifteen minutes. Sure, you can fight Klingons in fifteen minutes, [...] or you can beam down and look around a planet for fifteen minutes, but you can't tell an involved, deep, meaningful story with subtlety and character development in fifteen minutes."
I think they can string two together too, no?
That gives you SOME extra time (though I would argue that it's still not enough for some kinds of stories), but it also slashes your per minute budget in half.
If you mean they were smart enough to still have power to stop real threats, I agree.
There is no threat. I have yet to even hear someone propose a purely hypothetical one. That's not smart, that's Draconian.
But, it will be very hard for them to do anything to a true fan film that obeys the rules. They will look very bad, and a judge/jury would give quite a bit of weight to the concession of guidelines, especially to fans who are truly obeying the spirit of the guidelines. However, those that are breaking the spirit, might very well be in jeopardy.
First of all, if someone complies with absolute letter of every guideline, I question whether or not some abstract argument about them violating the "spirit" would have any real meaning in a court of law, especially since I don't think following the guidelines will serve any other purpose than mitigating damages, because it will have no effect on a judgment of whether or not you violated copyright.
They really have no obligation to make it fully balanced, which is why I used the term "merciful".
Good, we can dispense with the pretense.
However, I'm not naive enough to think mercy was their true endgame, but they could have driven Axanar into the dust. Even if they had a losing case (and I think they had a winning case anyway), they have much more money to enable them to do that
If
@Professor Zoom is to be believed, they already drove them into the dust, because AP is never going to release Axanar. Why keep fighting for money Axanar doesn't have to stop a film that's already dead?
It's really simple, if you don't like or can not work with the guidelines, don't make Star Trek Fan Films.
That's the whole point. Many of us are not making Star Trek fan films, because of our objection to the Guidelines. Some of us are even making our own "sandboxes". Like
@tharpdevenport said, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Some IP holders don't even allow fan fiction (Looking at you, Anne Rice)
Anne Rice has been accused of campaigns of coordinated harassment against fan authors, so I'd pick a better example.
CBS and Paramount have given an extraordinary amount of leeway when it comes to fan work.
Cory Doctorow licenses his books under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. By comparison, the Guidelines are pretty weak sauce.
So what's the problem with turning a star trek set into a generic or new scifi set and making new films? And making profit, even, if it doesn't look like star trek and doesn't call itself star trek, wouldn't be problematic because its not a violation of anyone elses IP.
Legally, there isn't one. Financially, they compete with CBS's content offerings in the marketplace, potentially reducing their profit. Of course, that not our concern, unless we own stock in CBS.
