Pretty sure once it's published, CBS owns it lock, stock and barrel. Contracts the writers of the books sign is far different than the contracts signed by those writing episodes.
The comics are now canon
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Pretty sure once it's published, CBS owns it lock, stock and barrel. Contracts the writers of the books sign is far different than the contracts signed by those writing episodes.
BillJ is right. The whole point of writing licensed tie-ins is that you're creating them on the studio's behalf as an outside contractor. That's what a license means. The studio is legally considered the author of the work for purposes of copyright, and owns all right and title to the work. If the publisher loses the license, that only changes things for the publisher, in that it can't publish any more tie-in material after that point. The studio still retains the ownership it always had.
^^ I do seem to remember hearing that the particular license agreement Franz Joseph signed with Paramount when he did The Star Fleet Technical Manual was different from modern standard license agreements (wherein the studio retains ownership of the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel), and that in consequence of this unique license agreement the Joseph estate retains partial copyright ownership of the SFTM (presumably in the same way that, say, Universal Pictures retains copyright ownership of Serenity even though 20th Century Fox still owns Firefly, upon which it ws based) but I don't know if that's true or not.
If that's true, though, that's a very unique circumstance that doesn't apply to any other licensed work.
As for unlicensed works... an unlicensed publication has by definition been sold in violation of CBS's copyright on Star Trek, and therefore the author has no copyright claim on it. I seem to remember hearing a long time ago that such unlicensed publications (such as fan fiction) are actually considered to become the legal intellectual property of the copyright owner of the work upon which it was based, but I don't know if that's true or not. Either way, someone who's written an unlicensed publication would have no recourse whatsoever if a writer on a canonical production chose to incorporate something from it into the canonical work.
If that's true, though, that's a very unique circumstance that doesn't apply to any other licensed work.
As for unlicensed works... an unlicensed publication has by definition been sold in violation of CBS's copyright on Star Trek, and therefore the author has no copyright claim on it. I seem to remember hearing a long time ago that such unlicensed publications (such as fan fiction) are actually considered to become the legal intellectual property of the copyright owner of the work upon which it was based, but I don't know if that's true or not. Either way, someone who's written an unlicensed publication would have no recourse whatsoever if a writer on a canonical production chose to incorporate something from it into the canonical work.
Uhm, sorry if this has been discussed, but if Orci thinks the comics are [whatever word you want to use to mean consistent with the films], and, assuming Cumberbatch plays Gary Mitchell... er, wasn't Mitchell's fate established in the reboot comics, overseen by Orci? How would that work?
It was still "official" because it was fully licensed; according to Richard Arnold, though, FASA chose (or simply neglected) not to send the final manuscript to the Star Trek Office to be vetted, only the original draft. Hence FASA was not invited to renew its contract after that 1989 memo.
Weren't Mitchell's eyes still 'glowing' at the end of the comic, suggesting he was still alive? (May have remembered wrong)
Not necessarily. Franz Joseph semi-licensed his material, with a rather one-sided contract that Roddenberry (and later) Paramount came to regret. I'm fairly sure ST was/is free to use anything (the ship for the cover of "Dreadnought!", and the deck plans featured in the movies) if they want to, but FJ was free to sub-license his designs - with no kick back to Paramount - which he did for the "Starfleet Battles" war gaming materials.
After being burned badly with FJ, I'm pretty sure FASA's material was owned by Paramount/Viacom, not FASA the company or the FASA team of writers and artists.
You really think they are going to start the next movie by having someone relate a previous adventure from a tie-in comic read by 1% of the viewing audience?
More likely, maybe Captain Garth, the Salt Vampire or Trelane shapeshifts into Gary Mitchell... and Spock, Uhura or Kirk says, "I know you're not the real Gary; he was our friend from the Academy - but he's dead!"
That may be true, but it was still licensed and "official" (inasmuch as that label has any meaning here at all).
Yes. The idea that license or lack thereof is something that imposes restrictions on the studio rather than the licensee is getting it backwards. The studio is the one that owns and controls the property, and others only get to use it to a limited extent at the studio's indulgence.
Orci doesn't think that. This has been established. The interviewer browbeat him with a particular idea about canon that the interviewer had, Orci facetiously played along just for the sake of getting the interviewer to change the subject, and then he promptly retracted it in the comments to the article. Orci reaffirmed, both in the original interview (before he was pressured into "agreeing" with the interviewer) and in the later comment, that he still stands by what he's been saying since 2009: that he respects and abides by the pre-existing standard that canonical Star Trek is what appears onscreen.
And we still don't know for sure who Cumberbatch is playing.
Gary Mitchell got turned into a newt??? When did this happen?
Things happen when you travel at high warp.
I'm really curious what this license actually was. I know that ADB (creators of Star Fleet Battles and related games) has had a license with Paramount since 1999, but how did things work for the 20 years before that regarding trademarked terms such as Klingons? I know they got permission from Larry Niven to use the Kzinti, which have been modified to be a bit different from his Kzin (cat ears instead of bat ones, no tails, sentient females), but when did that agreement come about? I know Lou Zocchi had a Star Fleet Technical Manual based wargame before ADB (Star Fleet Battle Manual) which is long out of print, but did anyone else license from Franz Jospeh? Such a strange situation.
I know there have been references in a few interviews over the decades. IIRC, Roddenberry and Paramount weren't expecting to see much profit in licensing a then-dead TV series, and the FJ "Technical Manual" and "Deck Plans" doing so well commercially caught everyone by surprise, and they regretted the sloppily worded contract and lax restrictions that permitted FJ the rights to sub-license his original ship designs to SFB, especially when Roddenberry realised how war-like the pre-RPG scenarios for "war games" were.
Again, that was a begrudging permission. Roddenberry and Paramount were powerless to retract the license set up between FJ and SFB. IIRC, when Niven himself tried to license "Ringworld" (with Kzinti) as a RPG, some time later, the fact that SFB had been using kzinti aliens and ships for years went against him. When the race was used in the fully-licensed SFB rejig, the "Starfleet Command" series of computer games (based on the old "Star Fleet Battles" materials), the kzinti were reconceived as the Mirak Star League, yet another antagonistic, felinoid race.
Yes, Heritage Models, the company that made the white-metal ships and aliens miniatures that could be used in war gaming and roleplay gaming, before fully-official licenses were picked up from Paramount by Citadel (UK; TMP) and FASA (USA; ST II & III).
The comics can be canon until contradicted by something on scree - so what? This is what:
I wanted long distance beaming to die an ignominious death - it just blows the lid off so many potential plots it's ridiculous and to make it worse ## SPOILERS### Scotty successfully beams a living organism not just one light year like in the movie but dozens of light years through several communications relays (which tend to be about 20 light years apart). In other words the writers have opened the Pandora's Box even wider - wff!
Oh no, the ship's power has been drained and we can't retrieve our landing party and we're the only ship in the quadrant - AGAIN - no worries, just radio a ship in a different quadrant or, hell, why not Starfleet Headquarters on Earth and beam them off from there. Good grief.
Somebody needs to lock this down and soon!
I wanted long distance beaming to die an ignominious death - it just blows the lid off so many potential plots it's ridiculous and to make it worse ## SPOILERS### Scotty successfully beams a living organism not just one light year like in the movie but dozens of light years through several communications relays (which tend to be about 20 light years apart). In other words the writers have opened the Pandora's Box even wider - wff!
Oh no, the ship's power has been drained and we can't retrieve our landing party and we're the only ship in the quadrant - AGAIN - no worries, just radio a ship in a different quadrant or, hell, why not Starfleet Headquarters on Earth and beam them off from there. Good grief.
Somebody needs to lock this down and soon!
People keep forgetting that long-distance beaming was introduced in TNG. DaiMon Bok used it in "Bloodlines" to beam onto the Enterprise from light-years away. That episode established that it was possible, but rarely used since it was unstable, unreliable, and demanded prohibitive amounts of power.
Salamanders anyone?
I don't mind quite so much when it's used as a limited plot device as long as there is some story logic and some weighing of the consequences i.e. one of the transportees not making it 'Cupcake knew the risks...' I can see a certain amount of logic in using a long distance signal device like a Blakes 7 bracelet but I prefer it if that were nedded even for short range transport. I don't see how the ship could carry outr a quantum scan from orbit without such a device let alone light years away.
As far as the comic goes, Scotty is beaming light years and nobody even notices a) that he's beaming a life form with no quarantine procedure or authorisation - surely transporters have some sort of auto quarantine function for unauthorised transports and if we assume that the Scottys deliberately disabled this that's probably a court martial offence for precisely the reasons we see in the comic); and b) any kind of appreciable power drain for the ship, the relay stations, or Starfleet.
My guess would be that the problem with long distance transport is not the distance, its the amount of signal leakage over distance and time. What's maintaining the anular confinement beam at the relay stations and where is the power coming from to maintain that confinement beam?
If the experiment had caused a power drain to the ship and fried the circuits in the relay stations I probably wouldn't have as much of a problem with it.
If transporters were required to make sense, there would be no transporters. Ultimately they're just a plot device.
Except the movie shoed us that long distance beaming could be accomplished with a couple of minutes adjustment and the use of a shuttlecraft transporter. I doubt Scotty's base had anything near a matter/anti-matter power source. The only failure was Scotty being beamed into a water pipe. They didn't arrive with excess velocity or partially merged into a bulkhead. It was more a failure of the sensors than the transport itself. I would assume that future Scotty's beaming is a different, safer version of long distance beaming that what Bok used.
The shuttles almost certainly have a matter/antimatter reactors and warp drive. If they didn't, the movie woud have been about Kirk growing up on Medical Shuttle 47.
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