One time I attended Philcon I went to a panel on Hammer films, and one of the panelists was an expert on Kensington Gore. He spent a good five or six minutes talking about what was in it and how it was made. 
Star Trek Public Domain??
- Thread starter Ogrebear
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Meanwhile, on other fronts:
Decades ago, around the time the first Antonio Banderas movie came out, I reprinted the original Zorro novel at Tor Books. It was technically in public domain but I threw $5,000 at Zorro Properties anyway, just so I could use their licensed trademarks and because, honestly, it seemed easier to work with them than against them.
In exchange, I not only got to use the trademarked "Z" on the covers but they also promoted the book on their website, via newsletters, etc.
I also ended up doing a line of new, original Zorro novels with them.
Decades ago, around the time the first Antonio Banderas movie came out, I reprinted the original Zorro novel at Tor Books. It was technically in public domain but I threw $5,000 at Zorro Properties anyway, just so I could use their licensed trademarks and because, honestly, it seemed easier to work with them than against them.
In exchange, I not only got to use the trademarked "Z" on the covers but they also promoted the book on their website, via newsletters, etc.
I also ended up doing a line of new, original Zorro novels with them.
Unfortunately only the first two McCulley prose serials/novels are in public domain so far, though I think the third serial (published 1931) and the first few short stories (1932-5) should become public domain over the next few years. The rest of the short stories came out from 1944-59, so it'll be a long time before they're public domain. The Hoopla online library has bare-bones audiobooks of the third and fourth serials, but there only seems to be one collection of the short stories and the libraries I have access to don't seem to have it. Odd that there's been so little interest in reprinting them.
It’s interesting that the Zorro canon includes four novel-length serials and 58 stories, similar to the Sherlock Holmes canon’s four novels and 56 stories, and that both series were contemporary with multiple screen adaptations of their characters. The first Zorro serial was adapted as a silent film a year later and influenced how McCulley described Zorro's costume in later prose stories, and the last Zorro story McCulley wrote came out during the Guy Williams TV series. Which makes me unsure whether the change from "Don Diego Vega" to "Don Diego de la Vega" originated in the prose stories or the Williams series. A number of later screen productions continued using just "Vega."
Yes, at least in that case.
Honestly, I believe it was mostly a trademark issue.
They wanted a name they could own, unlike “Sci-Fi”
This is correct. I worked at NBC Universal / SCI FI Channel at the time as the editor of scifi dot com (I resigned shortly before the brand transitioned to Syfy), and I recall very clearly our conversations with corporate management about the rebranding.
That's also why you'll see Star Trek content frequently references the Starship Enterprise with "Starship" capitalized and in italics, as if it's part of the name. Enterprise and U.S.S. Enterprise are too general to be trademarked, but adding the extra word makes it specific enough that they can protect it.
Or, at least, that used to be the case. Skimming back through the most recent TOS novels' back covers, the most recent one I can find using the phrase "Starship Enterprise" is A Contest of Principles in 2020 (though it looks like an early version of the description of Harm's Way in 2022 used it; it's present in the version of the description on MA, but not on the S&S website), but "Starship" is only capitalized, not italicized.
And once they started to insist on that, I did my best to avoid using the phrase "starship Enterprise" in my novels so that I wouldn't have to see that done to it. I'd go with "I'm Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise" or "This is Captain Picard of the Federation vessel Enterprise," that sort of thing.
I mean, why would you need to put a trademarked phrase in the interior text of a book, as opposed to the title logo or cover copy? There are plenty of untrademarked words in any given book -- most of them, I daresay.
One time I attended Philcon I went to a panel on Hammer films, and one of the panelists was an expert on Kensington Gore. He spent a good five or six minutes talking about what was in it and how it was made.
I'm jealous. I would have loved to have heard that.
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