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CBS Shuts Down Stage 9, a Fan-Made Recreation of the USS Enterprise (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: For those unfamiliar with the project, Stage 9 is a beautiful virtual recreation of the Enterprise ship from Star Trek: The Next Generation for Windows, Mac and Linux. More experience than game, Stage 9 was built by fans over two years in the Unreal Engine. "There were two things that we were always pretty careful with," says project leader 'Scragnog'. "We made it as clear as we possibly could that this was NOT an officially licensed project. We had no affiliation with CBS or Paramount and the IP we were trying our hardest to treat with respect was not our own. We were fans, just creating fan art."
In an announcement this week, Scragnog reminded fans that no one involved in the project was in it for any financial reason and everyone was well aware that throwing money into the mix could be a problem. However, the team says it has always known that they could be shut down at any time on the whim of a license holder because in this world, that's what can happen. Unfortunately, that day has come all too soon for the impressive project. Stage 9 was hit with an intellectual property complaint from CBS just over two weeks ago and has now been shut down.
"This letter was a cease-and-desist order," Scragnog explains. "Over the next 13 days we did everything we possibly could to open up a dialog with CBS. The member of the CBS legal team that issued the order went on holiday for a week immediately after sending the letter through, which slowed things down considerably."
In an announcement this week, Scragnog reminded fans that no one involved in the project was in it for any financial reason and everyone was well aware that throwing money into the mix could be a problem. However, the team says it has always known that they could be shut down at any time on the whim of a license holder because in this world, that's what can happen. Unfortunately, that day has come all too soon for the impressive project. Stage 9 was hit with an intellectual property complaint from CBS just over two weeks ago and has now been shut down.
"This letter was a cease-and-desist order," Scragnog explains. "Over the next 13 days we did everything we possibly could to open up a dialog with CBS. The member of the CBS legal team that issued the order went on holiday for a week immediately after sending the letter through, which slowed things down considerably."
I believe that is more applicable to trademarks than to copyright.
And with copyright, you can license use of your copyrighted work...and you can do it for nothing or maybe like $1, which would be good to do with some fan project like this.
If you actually sanctioned them, licensed them....you'd generate more goodwill and revenue for your commercial sales/uses of your copyrighted material.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
They don't HAVE to shut everything down.
They could just GIVE STAGE 9 A CONTRACT TO SIGN, stating that they will continue to be noncommercial and that CBS owns all the rights.
So long as Stage 9 is authorized, then there is no issue with them suing other, unauthorized, people who rip them off.
It depends on what is on the site and what the fans added to make their creation different or transformative. For example JK Rowling sued one Harry Potter encyclopedia fan site a few years back but whole heartedly endorses two others. So she's not against fan site but why did sue that one site?
The site that was sued just quoted her book for nearly all of their articles. Many times, the articles didn't properly use quotation marks or attributions to note that the entirety of the text came from one of her books. Without any original text, it's hard to argue that that site didn't infringe. In this case, other than remaking it in another format, what original work was contributed?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yep - after CBS started playing commercials on their streaming service within TV shows that are available over-the-air I canceled my subscription. Only got it to watch Star Trek Discovery - and honestly it was the worst Trek yet! I've been a fan since the original show originally aired! I can live without this!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
https://audienceservices.cbs.c...
When will media companies figure out that fan projects are good for them?
The more successful ones have. George Lucas was always OK with fan content, even very insulting fan content. The most striking is Jim Davis, owner of possibly the most financially successful modern IP, reached out to the creator of the "Garfield without Garfield" web site and, instead of a cease and desist, said "hey, want to publish a book".
Perhaps there's a reason those just made many billions of dollars.
Marvel is aggressive in protecting trademarks, but is otherwise surprisingly OK with fan content that doesn't get in the way of their merch sales. Heck, the Comics Explained YouTube channel is exactly the sort of thing that inept IP owners (including other parts of Disney) routinely shut down, and he probably makes more money from his Patreon than Marvel does from comic book sales these days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As pointed out a HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085119), the Internet Archive of the download page still has the well-seeded torrent links...
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ce1cf2847d8303a8e7e708cb378d9e7ab1534628&dn=Stage9-Mac-v009.zip
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:f2b84daf5a60ad9a452c933523de7ec786bbb0bd&dn=Stage9-Windows-v10.exe
You are mistaken. Trademark holders do, but there is absolutely no requirement that copyright holders do likewise. At most it sitting on a known copyright infringement without taking action may limit or even entirely block the damages that the copyright holder could collect for that particular infringement, but it would not at all impact one's ability to sue for later infringements by different parties, as would be the case for not taking action on a trademark violation.
And even if this *were* being alleged to be a trademark violation, they could probably rightfully claim nominal use of the trademark and be done with it (as long as they also explicitly said that it was not endorsed by CBS or Paramount, etc).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
ally CBS only shuts down fan projects for Star Trek when it's better than whatever they are making. For example, a fan project, Axanar about the first Federation Klingon war, was originally given the blessing of the studio to proceed so the fan production company made Prelude to Axanar and got a Kickstarter going to fund it. After CBS watched Prelude and realized that it had a more engaging story, more recognized actors and more faithful to canon (not to mention had a better-looking ship which is a big deal to ST fans) than their own property in development, the much-maligned abomination that is Star Trek: Discovery, they immediately began a legal war to stop the project for reasons that didn't become clear until ST:D launched. So this tells us two things, one they have a commercial project that uses a recreation of the Enterprise and two they don't want comparisons with whatever they're making with sweatshop pixel monkeys and something made with love by fans. I was going to pass on this whole thing because I figured it would suck but now they are doing this I'm going to find a place I can download it from as soon as I get home.
Many people in the technical crowd, which Star Trek tends to appeal to, are willing to shell out actual real $$$ to watch their shows, but not to pay $$$ AND have to watch commercials. That's *not* payment avoidance.
Yep. We're about to let Prime expire, because the alleged two-day shipping isn't two-day if you live anywhere interesting (in this case, near Mendocino) and because Prime shows commercials. If either of those things weren't true we'd probably keep it, but... meh. Super fucking tired not just of the ads, but of how Amazon keeps showing the same completely misplaced ones over, and over, and over, and over...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"