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the legal right to produce

Preventing everyone from producing something just because someone else has produced that same thing before. Yes, from the economic, legal and ethical perspectives, it falls very close to the realm of 'crazy'. And it certainly isn't compatible with a free market economy. Even the use of the phrase 'legal right to produce' indicates how far from a free market it is.

What about derivative works? For instance, being the bigtime Star Trek fan that I am, I create, produce, film, and distribute my own 'Star Trek' series with different non-canon characters and new storylines. Per the studios, I'm not allowed to do this. IIRC, Desilu Studios holds the copyrights on the original Star Trek series, and they can sue me for making my own 'Starship X' series even if I put 'Based Upon 'Star Trek' Created By Gene Roddenbery' in it someplace.

So far, though, nobody who does this strictly as nonprofit has been sued, such as Hidden Frontier and James Cawley's 'Phase 2'.

Hell, New Voyages even managed to find an actor with all the style & ego of Shatner to play Kirk.

The one fan show I'd love to see continue, Starship Exeter, is rumored to be closing down after its second episode is on the servers.

I also have extreme fondness for Hidden Frontier, shut down after its seventh season and which generated not one, but TWO spinoff series. Although most of HF's camera work could be considered cheesy as hell, you gotta remember that they had a budget of about 500 bucks an episode. I woulda loved to see this if they'd gotten any real money to play with; no more acting in front of a green screen...

And I've seen Episode 1 of Odessey (one of HF's spinoffs), it was great.

Ever seen Hidden Frontier http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/? Pretty good, considering they put it out for about 500 bucks an episode. It's now in its 7th & final season.

Wiki-based script creation

I don't doubt that you could get an OK or even good script by committee, but I think to get a great movie, you need one mind unhindered by others. (But you also get A LOT more junk that way)

I wish them luck, but this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me for a variety of reasons.
1) Most of the public will never hear about this. This means that those who do know about it and participate are unlikely to have what for lack of a better term I will call "common tastes". I can just imagine one faction pushing to make this "gay friendly", another wanting to take potshots at religious people, and so on.
2) The quality of the acting may be low. Cheap films don't necessarily have to have bad actors. The first Phantasm movie was made in the 1970s on a fairly cheap budget, yet if you watch it, the special effects look good for the time and the acting is fine. The Blair Witch Project is another example of a cheap movie with decent acting. Examples of cheap movies AND bad acting would be to watch most of the fan produced Star Wars or Star Trek shows. Go to http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ and pick any episode, especially in season 1 or 2, and watch it and tell me if you would pay to see that kind of work at a cinema. The special effects are fine, but the acting? That's another story. I just have visions of this kind of project being doomed by the producers casting their buddies who can't act in the movie.
3) Just because people on Slashdot think it's a great idea, that doesn't mean the general public will concur. Serenity didn't even make back its production cost with US and international box office sales put together, yet Slashdot was filled with postings from people who could barely keep from masturbating as they wrote about how great the movie was going to be. According to the reviews it was a great film (I never saw it so I can't say), but nobody wanted to see it. Snakes On A Plane was another movie that nobody went to see, yet it might have life on home video. Army Of Darkness is one of my all time favorite movies, yet as actor Bruce Campbell has said, while the people who love AOD really really love it with all their hearts, the fact is that there aren't enough of them to justify the costs of making another one in the series. Bruce will release a movie where some people mistake him (the actor) for the Ash character and get him to help them fight some monsters and that's probably as close as we'll ever get to a real sequel to the Evil Dead/Army Of Darkness series.
4) As a general rule in Hollywood, the more people who touch the script, the more problems there are. What's to keep a sufficiently organized faction from controlling the wiki process? Suppose instead of my examples in point #1 that a group of Christian zealots organized (and believe it or not, dedicated Christians often do organize very well) themselves and could control the wiki and wanted to put in religious themes that would doom the movie financially. Would the producers then overrule the majority? Why have a wiki process if you're just going to ignore it? Would they go ahead and put stuff in the movie that they know will keep it from making a profit just because the majority of participants want it?
5) Suppose the producers/director/people running the show are idiots? Do you not know that studies have shown that the most incompetent people are the most confident in their own abilities? Take a look at the film Ed Wood from Tim Burton for an idea of how an extremely untalented man could believe very strongly in his own talent, despite all the negative pressure (poor sales, poor reviews) he got while making films. He convinced himself that he was a genius and nobody else really understood him, so he ignored all the negative reinforcement he got while making films.

To me, this just smacks of the idealistic "Hey kids! Let's go make a movie!" idea that is not grounded in reality. Again, I wish them luck, but I don't see how this is going to work.

Spinoff fan series stink. They inevitably become fanboy wankfests designed to inflate the egos and fulfill the fantasies of whoever's producing the drivel.

Case in point: Star Trek: Hidden Frontier http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ where the main character is gay and has a Klingon boyfriend with a "gentleness" fetish.

GARBAGE!

Spinoff fan series stink. They inevitably become fanboy wankfests designed to inflate the egos and fulfill the fantasies of whoever's producing the drivel.

Case in point: Star Trek: Hidden Frontier http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ where the main character is gay and has a Klingon boyfriend with a "gentleness" fetish.

GARBAGE!

Per the website, outside 'help' is EXPRESSLY not solicited, and was actively discouraged.

For what I consider 'real' fanfic Trek video, hit http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ for the Star Trek: Hidden Frontier series currently starting production on their 7th season.

Given the existence of chemosynthetic life at ocean ridge hotspots, I wonder about the potential for life in the mantle. Surely the continuing convection in the mantle and subduction zones provides the potential for non-equilibrium chemical reactions that could be a basis for life. Perhaps some form of complex aluminosilicate chains/matrix or semi-crystalline blebs could form the basis for non-carbon-based life. I'm not expecting anything particularly mobile or obvous (a la the silcon-based Horta in Star Trek) but as long as a region supports both solid-phase and liquid-phase complex mixtures, then it seems life isn't impossible. Perhaps xenoliths are the corpolites or decomposed remnants of something down there.

A quick scan of the entire thread reveals no-one seems to have mentioned Horta yet - so there, I've done it!