Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard

[David cgc]

It might not be so simple. The US doesn’t have any kind of orphaned works carve-out, so even if FASA is out of business, the legal assumption is that someone, somewhere owns their copyrights (at least until they age out into the public domain).

Since designs can’t be copyrighted, the show using the shape of a Larson-esque starship is more-or-less fine so long as they made it on their own and it’s not a literal duplicate of a drawing from a FASA book, but calling it a “Larson-class ship” could open them to legal action from the owner of the FASA copyrights, whatever unknown hypothetical person or entity that may be.

Something similar is probably at work that the tiny model in PIC may resemble a Federation-class ship, but it is absolutely not in actuality a Federation-class ship, because the shape of the ship isn’t protected (especially not adapted from 2D drawings to a 3D object), but the specific drawings and written descriptions from the FJ book are.

 

[F. King Daniel]

IIRC,Franz Joseph Schnaubelt had a bit of a falling out with Gene Roddenberry over the rights to the Star Fleet Technical Manual ("Star Fleet" two words, offcial Star Trek spelling is now "Starfleet"), and I even read his graphics were snuck into movies I-III by his friends in the art department.

Lots of info via this interview with his daughter, Karen Dick: http://www.trekplace.com/fj-kdint01.html

 

[Turtletrekker]

Some good info here as well.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Dukhat]

It might not be so simple. The US doesn’t have any kind of orphaned works carve-out, so even if FASA is out of business, the legal assumption is that someone, somewhere owns their copyrights (at least until they age out into the public domain).

Since designs can’t be copyrighted, the show using the shape of a Larson-esque starship is more-or-less fine so long as they made it on their own and it’s not a literal duplicate of a drawing from a FASA book, but calling it a “Larson-class ship” could open them to legal action from the owner of the FASA copyrights, whatever unknown hypothetical person or entity that may be.

Something similar is probably at work that the tiny model in PIC may resemble a Federation-class ship, but it is absolutely not in actuality a Federation-class ship, because the shape of the ship isn’t protected (especially not adapted from 2D drawings to a 3D object), but the specific drawings and written descriptions from the FJ book are.

Paramount gave FASA a license to create role playing games based on Star Trek. So even if FASA still existed, anything they made for those games was property of Paramount. Heck, they used some of the ship designs on displays during the first season of TNG. They even used the FASA-created Orion symbol in LDS after all these years.

I believe any artwork created for the FASA games was just work for hire. None of the artists owned any of the artwork.

 

[Eudoxia]

There was a kinda-sorta tribute to the Larson in SNW with a Malachowski class with only one nacelle.

You know what would have been cool? If they'd used a bunch of FASA designs in the Starfleet Museum in PIC S3 instead of what they actually used. Or gotten permission from FJ's estate to use an actual CGI model of the dreadnought. Heck, they could have even created a TMP version of the dreadnought and not gotten into any trouble because it's still not the FJ version.

Yeah it didn't make much sense for the Saber to be totally out of commission yet. They're only about 30-33 years old by the time of PIC S3. If you run the math Starfleet ship classes average 46 to 48 (Miranda and Excelsior do quite a bit of skewing higher) and individual ships average typically around 35 (I have this all worked out in a spreadsheet somewhere). And if any ship was going to be the new "100 year ship"/"Excelsior" it's the Nebula...

Most of the ships there made sense though. Although if I was going to fight the Borg with a crew of 7 it would have made way more sense to take the Defiant...

Frankly we should have seen USS Ambassador instead of one of the two Akiras as well. Default Saratoga instead of the recreated Sisko's Saratoga. The Bounty and Kronos One at least make some sense, less so a T'Liss-class bird of prey. Put something like one of the W359 designs or a Vulcan/Andorian/Tellarite design or something there. A Cali-class would have been a nice callout to Lower Decks as they should be retired by PIC's time.

 

[Dukhat]

The Starfleet Museum was a huge letdown for me. There was so much potential to show ships from Trek’s rich history (especially since their whole aim seemed to be an over-reliance on nostalgia), and we end up with things like 2 Akiras, a Saber, a Nebula, some ship from STO I’d never seen before, a Romulan BoP that we had just seen in a previous season, and ships we’d seen a million times before in DS9. Very disappointing. The only real redeeming quality is that we found out the ultimate fates of the Ent-A and Voyager. That’s about it.

 

[cooleddie74]

The NX-01 Refit was there, which made not only Doug Drexler happy but a whole lot of other fans. It was a very welcome sight, even if the Refit configuration isn't my favorite for that ship.

 

[Dukhat]

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about the NX-01. Whoops.

 

[HotRod]

Don't worry, the show itself also seemed to forget about the NX-01 being there and not at the ceremony celebrating its very launch.

 

[Vagabond Elf]

Paramount gave FASA a license to create role playing games based on Star Trek. So even if FASA still existed, anything they made for those games was property of Paramount. Heck, they used some of the ship designs on displays during the first season of TNG. They even used the FASA-created Orion symbol in LDS after all these years.

I believe any artwork created for the FASA games was just work for hire. None of the artists owned any of the artwork.

Well, that would depend a lot on the terms of the license. Granted that by 1983 the license almost certainly has all IP revert back to Paramount, it's also possible that a more complex structure like "anything FASA creates belongs to FASA, so it can't be used without FASA's permission, but it also can't be used in anything Star Trek related or adjacent without Paramount's permission." This is less likely given the relative leverage of the two companies, but also a very possible structure, and would fit the known facts: FASA mae a game with Paramount's permission, FASA stopped printing their game when Paramount withdrew their permission, and images inspired by FASA have been seen in CBS artworks but the text terms written by FASA haven't been used and have actually been avoided.

IP law is complicated. As a law librarian, the only thing less fun than researching IP law was researching family law...

(I do agree that the artwork itself was probably work-for-hire so whoever owns the copyrights to the images is whoever got the rights from FASA when FASA went under.)

 

[137th Gebirg]

I have no doubt that, at the time, Paramount's lawyers were considerably better-paid than FASA's lawyers. The former likely built an iron-clad contract that would favor Paramount in all things with their exclusive licensing, reverting all IP ownership back to Paramount in perpetuity, if the license was cancelled for any reason. If this was not the case, FASA's lawyers could be considered guilty of legal malpractice for not using their full leverage in that negotiation. I'm sure Paramount owns it all. They just choose not to use it, because there probably are adjacent little guild-or-something-related laws where the creators of certain things should get some kind of stipend for the use of their work, or at the very least an end-credit name-drop.

I am 100% talking out of my ass right now, but it really does all makes sense, based on my own personal experience with lawyers and the endless flotsam of dumb-ass byzantine laws that they all exploit to keep the latest spit-shined model of Alfa Romeo in the garage.

 

[Dukhat]

FASA designs were name-dropped in novels, shown in comics, and seen on displays in TNG. So I’m pretty sure the stipulations of any license agreement Paramount made allowed the designs to be used in other formats, and not exclusively for the role playing games. That would assume that the artists did not own or have a copyright over their ship designs/artwork.

As for now, again it’s highly doubtful that a defunct roleplaying game company, whose license to produce Star Trek material was revoked in 1990, has any say in the matter if, say, SNW decided to use a Chandley class frigate or a Romulan Z-1 Nova class battleship in the show. (Not that I think this is ever going to happen, since as @137th Gebirg said, Paramount would not want to deal with any minuscule law that might get them in trouble.)

 

[Macintosh]

The Starfleet Museum was a huge letdown for me. There was so much potential to show ships from Trek’s rich history (especially since their whole aim seemed to be an over-reliance on nostalgia), and we end up with things like 2 Akiras, a Saber, a Nebula, some ship from STO I’d never seen before, a Romulan BoP that we had just seen in a previous season, and ships we’d seen a million times before in DS9. Very disappointing. The only real redeeming quality is that we found out the ultimate fates of the Ent-A and Voyager. That’s about it.

And the Excelsior NCC-2000! I was very pleased to see she was still around.

 

[Dukhat]

And the Excelsior NCC-2000! I was very pleased to see she was still around.

Sure, I get your nostalgia for that. For me, it was just a design I'd seen a million times before in TNG and DS9. And because there was zero focus on it, it could have been any Excelsior class ship. The only reason why we knew it was the original was because of background info.

 

[Mage]

Sure, I get your nostalgia for that. For me, it was just a design I'd seen a million times before in TNG and DS9. And because there was zero focus on it, it could have been any Excelsior class ship. The only reason why we knew it was the original was because of background info.

Seeing the NX-01 refit and the Stargazer was amazing as I thought.

I think I get you, you'd think we'd get more eye candy. But I'm going with, that in universe these ships were in the middle of great events.
AND.... perhaps some more monumental ships were inside. Like the E-D was.

 

[HotRod]

Seeing the NX-01 refit and the Stargazer was amazing as I thought.

 

[cooleddie74]

Yeah, the f/x artists could have done better jobs with the background ships.

 

[Dukhat]

Seeing the NX-01 refit and the Stargazer was amazing as I thought.

I think I get you, you'd think we'd get more eye candy. But I'm going with, that in universe these ships were in the middle of great events.
AND.... perhaps some more monumental ships were inside. Like the E-D was.

I fully admit that as a ship porn guy, I was completely biased as to my expectations. But with that said, it was very disappointing that many of these ships went unnoticed. The Excelsior, the Stargazer, the NX-01 etc. were completely ignored, despite one ship being Jack’s dad’s old ship, and another being the very reason for Frontier Day.

 

[cooleddie74]

The one halfway decent shot of the NX-01 is a quick panning shot that also has Gorkon's Kronos One parked in the display ring right in front of Archer's ship.

 

[Tuskin38]

Well some of them were STO models, they were never going to get extreme close up shots, as they're not TV show quality models.

The Connie model they used for the New Jersey also didn't not look great.