Dude, they literally copied most of the artwork like an overlay, and the parts that weren't copied were done in the obvious Seussian style. Just putting "parody" in the title does not "Make It So".
David Gerrold penned book gets 9th Circuited
- Thread starter Maurice
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Simple: the copyright holder hasn't made a fuss about it. Guess they figure it's not worth their time and effort.
Remember that unlike Patents and Trademarks, there is no legal requirement to defend Copyrights from any and all violations. The copyright holder can be as selective as they want in defending / not defending their works.
Patents and Trademarks risk falling into the Public Domain if not defended at every drop of the hat.
Remember that unlike Patents and Trademarks, there is no legal requirement to defend Copyrights from any and all violations. The copyright holder can be as selective as they want in defending / not defending their works.
Patents and Trademarks risk falling into the Public Domain if not defended at every drop of the hat.
I can also imagine that Star Trek Continues is non-threatening to Paramount because it's free on the internet and, while quite amazing for a fan production, not on the same level as official Star Trek production as far as quality goes.
If CBS felt it was a impacting their brand negatively then a C&D would have happened.
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I didn't know that about copyrights, the non-need to defend every perceived infringement.
And re. STC use of copyrighted compositions and recordings:
One gets away with what one can.
I wonder what CBS would do if they repurposed video clips. Using the original ship flybys and effects shots, cleaned up woulda been super cool. (I like STC btw.)
Copyright issues/cases are something I always enjoy for some reason. Wonder why.
And re. STC use of copyrighted compositions and recordings:
One gets away with what one can.
I wonder what CBS would do if they repurposed video clips. Using the original ship flybys and effects shots, cleaned up woulda been super cool. (I like STC btw.)
Copyright issues/cases are something I always enjoy for some reason. Wonder why.
Others could speak to this better than I but my understanding is that it comes down to perception of damage and possible confusion of the brand. So, using actual clips from the show could impact public perception and CBS could regard that poorly and order it to be stopped. Versus fan productions which labored for a long time under CBS' willingness to ignore it until other productions pushed the limits of their grace and resulted in limitations of what could be done without necessarily fear of being ordered to stop.
Bearing in mind that using CBS property, in this case Star Trek, without permission, still opens you up to a possible C&D. It's still their property.
Is it certain that they are not paying for the music? A music license is generally more straightforward and accessible than film/video.
Yes. Fanfic is tolerated as long as no attempt is made to profit from it. If it's given away for free, then it's homage, and it's free publicity for the owners of the property. But if you try to make money from it and don't give its rightful owners a cut, then it becomes plagiarism. That's what got the Axanar people in trouble, and deservedly so -- they crossed the line, broke the unwritten agreement between the studio and fanfic creators, and tried to profit from their production, and the studio was forced to crack down.
Again, it depends on the whims of the IP holder. Trek seems to be "anything goes". JK Rowling allowed most fan-fic but actively went after (to include using legal C&D orders) those that put her "teenage characters in adult scenarios." And if memory serves, I believe Anne McCaffrey used to block ALL fan-fic based on her works, in particular the Dragon Rider series. (I did a quick Google to confirm that, but now I find a message dated 2010 where she says she would allow fan-fic under her rules. She passed away in 2011.)
Sure, some owners are stricter about it than others, but I was talking specifically about Trek. Historically, Paramount/CBS has been tolerant of fanfic and fan films, because Roddenberry had urged them to be. But the proviso was always that it be done strictly for fun and not for profit.
The participants over in the "Fan Productions" forum probably have greater insights into this stuff.
FWIW, CBS's current Star Trek fan film "Guidelines for Avoiding Objections" (that caused all that uproar a few years back) say nothing about music or sound effects, but they do specify that video clips from official Trek productions can't be used. Source: https://www.startrek.com/fan-films
Kor
I've read the book cover to cover, and yes. It's an extremely clever mash-up/parody of Trek and Seuss, and it deserves to be seen by a wider audience.
(Full disclosure: I'm friendly with Ty and Glenn, and I've met & had nice conversations with Gerrold, and none of them deserve this lawsuit. It's just a nuisance suit because the Seuss estate doesn't want it published.)
Absolutely. This isn't about infringement, this is about the Seuss estate being overly litigious. You can't trademark an art or a writing style, for crying out loud.
Yeah, that's bullshit. Ty is an incredible ghost artist, and he doesn't need to lightbox Seuss's work to do a convincing style parody of Seuss.
No; it's infringement. Plagiarism is plagiarism, regardless of copyright status, regardless of profit: it is the act of passing off somebody else's work as one's own. Or as the 1981 American Heritage Dictionary puts it:
(And note that I did not plagiarize the above quote from the AHD; it was very clearly credited!)
And note that it can even be plagiarism if one pays a professional writer to write an opus, to specification, to be passed off as one's own: that is precisely what one does when one hires a "term paper mill" to defraud one's school: academic plagiarism.
Practical examples: (1) if I were to issue a facsimile edition of ADF's Nor Crystal Tears, complete in every way, without buying the rights to do so, it would be infringement (because I was both deriving wrongful profit and interfering with ADF's and Ballantine's right to profit from it), but it would not be plagiarism (because I made no attempt to pass it off as anybody's work but ADF's). (2) If I were to engage in academic plagiarism by hiring a term paper mill, it would be plagiarism (because I was passing somebody else's work off as my own), but not infringement (because the opus was bought and paid for).
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Ah. Thanks for the correction.
Plagiarism, unless you use someone's exact words (thus violating their copyrigth) isn't usually illegal.
I taught high school 30 years, and the kids (wanting to do the least work -- it's natural human energy conservation!
) would want to know just exactly how many words they had to change so it wouldn't be plagiarism. It was a higher-level idea that it wasn't the exact words per se, but taking someone's thought and passing it off as your own. Luckily we have an easy solution. Borrow the thought . . . just CITE it. Easy.
Plagiarism is rarely illegal though unless it includes defrauding someone. It will ruin a political campaign or get ya fired from a uni years later if someone discovers it.
In the preinternet age I was a grad assistant and a prof assigned me once to go to the library and find where some student had plagiarised from. And we did! In the last half of my teaching career all I had to do was google about two sentences in quotation marks. THEN have the big conversation, fail 'em on the assignment, and for my college classes, report to the dean and get them put on the first offender list. Dnh-dnh-dnh!
I taught high school 30 years, and the kids (wanting to do the least work -- it's natural human energy conservation!
) would want to know just exactly how many words they had to change so it wouldn't be plagiarism. It was a higher-level idea that it wasn't the exact words per se, but taking someone's thought and passing it off as your own. Luckily we have an easy solution. Borrow the thought . . . just CITE it. Easy. Plagiarism is rarely illegal though unless it includes defrauding someone. It will ruin a political campaign or get ya fired from a uni years later if someone discovers it.
In the preinternet age I was a grad assistant and a prof assigned me once to go to the library and find where some student had plagiarised from. And we did! In the last half of my teaching career all I had to do was google about two sentences in quotation marks. THEN have the big conversation, fail 'em on the assignment, and for my college classes, report to the dean and get them put on the first offender list. Dnh-dnh-dnh!
Plagiarism, while not necessarily a crime, is still a tort.
Somebody wiser than I once said that stealing from one is plagiarism, while stealing from many is research.
So was George Lucas putting his own byline on ADF's anonymously ghostwritten novelization of the first SW movie plagiarism? ADF doesn't seem to think so: he'd simply been hired to turn Lucas's screenplay into prose.
What about the ST "Autobiographies"? Hardly. Kirk, Picard, and Janeway are fictional characters. They can't write anything in the real world, and nobody has any reasonable expectation that something labeled as The Autobiography of James T. Kirk would be anything other than a work of fiction, written entirely by its purported "editor."
What about the Reeves-Stevenses co-writing the "Shatnerverse" novels? No; they're acknowledged as co-authors with Shatner, and their own description of the process, as I recall, is that it's his story, his ideas, and all they did was turn them into comprehensible prose.
What about Edward Stratemeyer passing story outlines to young writers, hungry enough to anonymously ghostwrite for a paycheck, and then publishing the resulting children's novels under such pseudonyms as Laura Lee Hope, Franklin W. Dixon, and Carolyn Keene? That gets a bit stickier, because for many years, most people weren't aware that the purported authors of those books were themselves fictional characters, and it wasn't until James Keeline published a web site on the pseudonymous works of the Stratemeyer Syndicate that the identities of the ghostwriters became readily available to the general public.
I will also note that some universities and colleges will treat certain types of academic fraud as "plagiarism" even though it is not. Turning in the same paper for credit more than once, if not done openly and with the full informed consent of all the professors involved, may be fraudulent, but so long as it is entirely one's own work, it cannot meet the strict definition of plagiarism (and in some cases, e.g., using a class in term paper writing to write a paper for a science or history class, should be actively encouraged, so long as it is done openly, because the close supervision the student receives in the writing class almost guarantees that the student cannot get away with even a "custom job" from a term paper mill. And neither should a student be penalized, much less accused of plagiarism, for submitting a paper based on his or her own prior work (again, so long as it is done openly): when I took my semester of term paper writing at CSU Long Beach, Dr. Bell did a presentation, as I recall, on how one of his high school papers ultimately evolved into his doctoral dissertation, and encouraged us to do so (in my case, the paper I wrote for that class was an extensively revised and expanded version of a sort of "computer literacy manifesto" I'd written a year earlier, when I took term paper writing in my senior year of high school).
Which is to say that I have, since the second semester of my freshman year at CSULB (a few months shy of 41 years ago, and I still have my MLA Handbook), strongly believed that a closely supervised class in term paper writing -- accompanied by an institution-wide rule that double-counting papers written for that class must always be acceptable, so long as it is done openly -- should be an absolute requirement that can no more be challenged or "tested out" of than, say, the required semester of U.S. Government, and that such a requirement is the best defense against term paper mills: it replaces fear of the work involved with appreciation of the work involved, and builds the skills to do the work involved.
Somebody wiser than I once said that stealing from one is plagiarism, while stealing from many is research.
So was George Lucas putting his own byline on ADF's anonymously ghostwritten novelization of the first SW movie plagiarism? ADF doesn't seem to think so: he'd simply been hired to turn Lucas's screenplay into prose.
What about the ST "Autobiographies"? Hardly. Kirk, Picard, and Janeway are fictional characters. They can't write anything in the real world, and nobody has any reasonable expectation that something labeled as The Autobiography of James T. Kirk would be anything other than a work of fiction, written entirely by its purported "editor."
What about the Reeves-Stevenses co-writing the "Shatnerverse" novels? No; they're acknowledged as co-authors with Shatner, and their own description of the process, as I recall, is that it's his story, his ideas, and all they did was turn them into comprehensible prose.
What about Edward Stratemeyer passing story outlines to young writers, hungry enough to anonymously ghostwrite for a paycheck, and then publishing the resulting children's novels under such pseudonyms as Laura Lee Hope, Franklin W. Dixon, and Carolyn Keene? That gets a bit stickier, because for many years, most people weren't aware that the purported authors of those books were themselves fictional characters, and it wasn't until James Keeline published a web site on the pseudonymous works of the Stratemeyer Syndicate that the identities of the ghostwriters became readily available to the general public.
I will also note that some universities and colleges will treat certain types of academic fraud as "plagiarism" even though it is not. Turning in the same paper for credit more than once, if not done openly and with the full informed consent of all the professors involved, may be fraudulent, but so long as it is entirely one's own work, it cannot meet the strict definition of plagiarism (and in some cases, e.g., using a class in term paper writing to write a paper for a science or history class, should be actively encouraged, so long as it is done openly, because the close supervision the student receives in the writing class almost guarantees that the student cannot get away with even a "custom job" from a term paper mill. And neither should a student be penalized, much less accused of plagiarism, for submitting a paper based on his or her own prior work (again, so long as it is done openly): when I took my semester of term paper writing at CSU Long Beach, Dr. Bell did a presentation, as I recall, on how one of his high school papers ultimately evolved into his doctoral dissertation, and encouraged us to do so (in my case, the paper I wrote for that class was an extensively revised and expanded version of a sort of "computer literacy manifesto" I'd written a year earlier, when I took term paper writing in my senior year of high school).
Which is to say that I have, since the second semester of my freshman year at CSULB (a few months shy of 41 years ago, and I still have my MLA Handbook), strongly believed that a closely supervised class in term paper writing -- accompanied by an institution-wide rule that double-counting papers written for that class must always be acceptable, so long as it is done openly -- should be an absolute requirement that can no more be challenged or "tested out" of than, say, the required semester of U.S. Government, and that such a requirement is the best defense against term paper mills: it replaces fear of the work involved with appreciation of the work involved, and builds the skills to do the work involved.