On one hand I'm glad there are guidelines now, but on the other hand some of these are a little overboard IMHO.
"The fan production must be family friendly and suitable for public presentation. Videos must not include profanity, nudity, obscenity, pornography, depictions of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or any harmful or illegal activity,"
I mean Star Trek itself has "violated" a few of these!!!
All of them, actually. And I notice that "obscenity" and "illegal activity" are really vague terms that could be twisted however they choose.
For example, one of the fan films has same-sex marriage as part of the plot. Some people consider that obscene (yes, I know it's legal in the US now, but that hasn't changed some peoples' opinions).
Yes, and I'm fine with that, because it's their property, and they don't want to deal with the headache of a fan production doing something that could come back against them. For example, show a child actor getting drunk in a fan production, and who gets to feel the heat from that? CBS/P, because all people will see is the giant STAR TREK in the title. This makes perfect sense for CBS/P.
Hmm. I don't remember... is tranya an alcoholic drink? The reason I mention this is because the actor who played Balok in "The Corbomite Maneuver" was only about 6 or 7 years old. No, Balok didn't get drunk, but it was still a child actor playing a character drinking a beverage presumably meant for adults.
Every Warner Bros. cartoon is 8 minutes or less. You get character intro, rivalry, conflict, resolution, and a crap ton of jokes all in that tiny amount of time. Hell, one of my favorite Dr. Who stories is the one where Paul McGann becomes the war Doctor and that's 6:48 seconds.
Night of the Doctor was a lot longer than 6.48 seconds.
I've just been wondering if these guidelines would have to be applied to fan fiction as well. They do reference them as fan productions and not just fan film.
They could shut down fanfic sites if they really wanted to. As mentioned, they could even raid the dealers' room at a convention. Or they could prohibit people from selling print 'zines on eBay.
But they can't prevent people from writing stories or poems, drawing pictures, and showing them to friends, any more than Marion Zimmer Bradley's estate could swoop in and confiscate any Darkover material sitting in my desk drawer (the order came down that if anyone has such material at home, we were to either destroy it immediately, or rewrite it so that it couldn't possibly be identified as a Darkover story).
If I were to write a Star Trek story for next month's NaNoWriMo entry, there's not a damn thing anyone can do to stop me... because NaNo entries are not posted on that site, nor are they even read by anyone who runs the site. Some people post excerpts of their stories, but that's not something I ever do.
As Peter David said, lawyers could raid a convention dealers' room. But due to sheer impossible logistics, they can't raid the private collections of fans on (at least) three continents, or police what people write for their own amusement and never post anywhere.
That said, most fanfic writers understand that they have to post disclaimers saying that they don't own Star Trek, its characters, and have no intention of trying to profit from what they've written. Reputable fanfic archive sites are quite stern in that regard.