Paramount+ 60th Anniversary Intro
- Thread starter Tallguy
- Start date
Again, the design is not an ownable thing.
There are four kinds of legally protected intellectual property: copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. These are all unnatural monopolies enforced by the government so as to allow creative individuals to profit from their works, which would otherwise be trivially easy for someone else to reproduce.
Patents and trade secrets are for useful inventions, products, and methods. If you were going to get IP protection for the design of an object, this is the most likely path (you may have seen that around TSFS, Paramount patented the shapes of the TMP Enterprise, Excelsior, and Klingon Bird of Prey as designs for toys), but it’s tricky, because an imaginary spaceship is not a functional device. Plus patents have a relatively short lifespan.
Trademarks are specific logos or names used to identify entities in the marketplace. Only the Coca-Cola company can sell liquid in a red can with a silver “Coca-Cola” logo on it, and the government enforces that because it’s useful to the public to have a way to be sure that they’re buying a tasty sugary drink from a reputable manufacturer and not some mud off the ground a charlatan put into a Coke can because they don’t care if they poison their customer and the Coke people take the fall.
This is also a method to protect some Star Trek IP, since the phrases “Star Trek” and “Starship Enterprise” are protected trademarks (but not “USS Enterprise” or just “Enterprise,” those are too nonspecific to be trademarked). That’s why you’ll often see unlicensed models that are for sale talk around what they are. It’s not “Star Trek TOS Starship Enterprise,” it’s “23rd century Constitution space-cruiser” or something like that.
Copyrights are for creative works that, in a nutshell, can be trivially and indefinitely copied mechanically by people other than the original creator. It’s the right to make copies. Not pastiches, not recreations, copies. Burning a TOS episode to a blu-ray and selling or giving it to someone else is a violation of CBS/Paramount’s exclusive right to make and sell copies of that episode as the owner of record.
But what’s being copied when Marc Bell makes a model of the TOS Enterprise? It’s not the original model, that’s made of wood and sitting in the Smithsonian, while Bell’s model is a digital file. It’s not the photographs or film recordings of the physical model used in the episodes, Bell made a 3D model that can be viewed from any angle under any lighting, totally different from a photograph. It’s not even the 3D models used in ENT, TOS-R, PIC, STO, or so on, since Bell made his model independently, he didn’t duplicate one of those existing, official digital models.
The design, the idea of the Enterprise, is not something that can be protected. I’m not speaking of the specific law, I mean logically, because of how the world works. I’m on my phone, not my computer, or else I’d drop in a few variations of it to ask when it stops being the thing you think Paramount owns, but I can jump to the most extreme example.
Do you think the following model of the TOS Enterprise is an infringement of CBS/Paramount’s ownership of the design?
O-E
It’s got a saucer, a neck, three straight protrusions extending back: CBS/Paramount owns this post and I’m subject to legal penalties and they’re now able to profit from reusing my words without credit or compensation, right? (The board terms of service probably has something to say about what rights I’m granting over my writing by posting here at all so it can function, but let’s put that aside.)
Specific models of the Enterprise can be copyrighted, but the Enterprise itself, a conceptual configuration of shapes and colors, can’t be. Each model created of it involves some amount of creative expression from the creator (it’s how we know it was Bell’s model used in the intro animation, he made it in a way unique to him and there are identifiable aspects no other model would have). It’s like a life-drawing session. Every artist is drawing the same person on the stage, but that person doesn’t automatically own all the drawings done by everyone in the class because they’re drawings of that person. Not even if the drawings are all pretty similar to each other.
Legalistically, as with everything else. You can’t legally distribute your Star Trek script because it contains elements CBS/Paramount owns, but CBS/Paramount can’t just download it from AO3 and film it themselves either because it contains elements you own (again, the reason for the “no story ideas” rule in TrekLit), so you make a deal with CBS/Paramount to work together and share the money. It’s the same reason every Star Trek show or movie has a “Based on Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry” credit in front. Roddenberry’s estate (by way of CBS/Paramount) has to work with, let’s say, Rick Berman & Michael Piller (again, through CBS/Paramount) so both parties have co-ownership of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Which further trickles down to the writers of the individual episodes.
Coca-Cola might come after them for that name though.
Barely.
I don’t think 2007 Doctor Who can claim to have invented a simple bit of rhythm like that.
