Oh, one other thing (there's just so much and I am pulling this stuff from memory) - they paid themselves salaries.
No lie!
It's in their own poorly-written and incorrectly calculated financials, which are referenced in these places (and ended up in legal exhibits during motion practice):
The Peters salary of $38,000 per annum was referred to by him, on more than one occasion as, "practically minimum wage" (N. B. Minimum wage in the great state of California was
upped to $15/hour by the legislature in 2016. This would bring an annual minimum wage, assuming a 40-hour week with 2 weeks of unpaid vacation, seeing as a lot of minimum wage workers don't get vacation and simply aren't paid if they don't work, to $30,000, AKA only 78.94% of the salary drawn by Peters).
The Kingsbury salary was always listed as "deferred", which is against
California labor law. She also had her own gas card from the production, paid for by the donors.
Along with the automotive necessities, the meals, and the convention appearances (including travel and to pay to get onto the fast line at airport security), is also known as ....
....
(wait for it)
....
(drum roll please)
profit.
Someone profiting off an IP they do not own and are copying is pretty close to the textbook definition of copyright infringement. The copying was slavish and as close as they could make it - because they
wanted it to be confused for the real thing.
The concept of it being "too good" is often misunderstood, and the production doesn't really take pains to correct any misconceptions. It's not that it's quality in the sense that
quality = good stuff, superior stuff, lovely stuff we want to hug and squeeze and name George. Rather, the term
quality, in this sense = characteristic. Saying it was a production of Trek quality does not impart any artistic merit. Instead, in this sense, it means the paying public could be confused.
A confused paying public is a part of what's called 'market harm', which is a way of showing damages in a case such as this.
- Profit
- Slavish copying/striving for an accurate copy
- Market harm
- Confused public
- No permission
- Warnings from official folks (John Van Citters, VP of CBS Product, for one)
- Attempting to create a for-profit business
- Perks never going out/film not being delivered
- Store with knockoff merch
- Convention trips riding on the backs of donor funds
- Salaries
These are the fundamentals of this case, no matter what the Axanar-loving crowd claims.
PS
@urbandefault thanks!
But yeah, totally.
