The people behind Axanar are paying themselves salaries out of donor money that was acquired through marketing that hinged on CBS IP. This, in my opinion, is the big one
I'm kind of amazed that people think it's proof of "pocketing money" for people to get salaries from working on a nonprofit venture. $38K a year is just $15K over the poverty line. It is not an outre salary for someone working on a nonprofit venture or proof that someone is being given money for doing nothing.
[Look, "non-profit" does not mean and has never meant that there is no
income and nobody is
paid. It makes people sound profoundly ignorant to talk that way and they should stop. Some of the people you're talking to
work sixty-hour weeks in the fucking not-for-profit sector, you know? That's not how non-profit works, and indeed it would not be possible for non-profits to exist and function in any form anywhere if that was the standard. Nobody has alleged AFAIK, anyway, that Axanar's claims to be non-profit at present were false, and as has been correctly stated well previously in the thread, their paying people isn't interesting proof of wrongdoing.]
It seems quite clear, at any rate, that the question of profit or lack of it isn't really relevant to copyright infringement. What likely crossed the line for CBS was the sheer scale of the Axanar project and
its self-portrayal as being more than a fan-film -- they were after all quite specific about citing that -- and very possibly its having demonstrated the capability (a la
Prelude) to deliver a product that would actually be seen that way by some significant proportion of the public. (Some have theorized that the announcement that Ares Studios would be used to procure profit in future ventures, effectively blurring the lines between non-profit and for-profit capital fundraising, but I haven't read the full complaint yet so that's just guessing and at any rate I'm far from sure how major a factor it would really be, given the whole profit vs. non-profit thing being something of a sideshow, legally.)
When I believed CBS wasn't going to bring the hammer down, it was because I thought that
Prelude would have been the obvious thing to bring the hammer down on. Which just goes to show that I was totally guessing (unsurprisingly) about how CBS legal thinks. Perhaps they were simply playing out the rope at that point the better to thoroughly make an example of Axanar in the long term, which given their insistence on a jury trial seems more plausible? But who knows. Lesson learned, I'm done guessing.
(I mean if people are giving money away all willy nilly).
