Paramount DMCAs ‘Star Trek’ Fan Project, Apparently Deaf To The History Of ‘Star Trek’
Of all the things we cover here at Techdirt, content producers going legal on pure fan-made productions that amount to fans expressing their fandom will always be the most befuddling for me. All the more so when it comes to content that was essentially kept alive by this same sort of fan-made work. Take the Star Trek franchise, for instance. Viacom/CBS and Paramount has gone after fan-made works playing off of the franchise for years and years. Even Paramount's release of guidelines by which fans could create fan films served mostly as a giant middle finger to the fandom, so stringent were the rules. This apparently represents the owners of Star Treks IP being completely deaf to the history of Star Trek and the internet and what the fans have meant to the franchise.
And this all continued into the present day. Recently, a fan-made project called Wolf 359 Project suffered a DMCA takedown from Paramount. If you're a Next Generation fan, that name will likely sound familiar.
The Battle of Wolf 359 hearkens to a classicThe Next Generationtwo-episode event called The Best of Both Worlds." Captain Picard is assimilated by the Borg, and before the Enterprise crew rescues him, the relentless Borg forces fight a battle that kills 11,000 people.Star Trek: PicardSeason 3 dealt with this, specifically throughthe character of Captain Liam Shaw. It was the first time someone described the Starfleet experience during one of the costliest battles inStar Trekhistory.Star Trekfans are never one to let a good idea go to waste, and TheWolf 359 Projectis a fan-written oral history of the battle. The book" ran over 500 pages long, and its authors were giving it away for free. However, Paramount issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act strike against it.
So here's what this essentially is: fans who love TNG filling in the gaps of the original story they love with the unexplored rest of the universe of people who would have been impacted by that storyline. That's important for two reasons. First and foremost, this doesn't take anything away from Paramount's Star Trek production, and in fact does the opposite. The project doesn't replace the original episodes, but rather builds upon them. In other words, this project could only possibly serve to draw more interest to Paramount's product, since the book isn't going to make much sense to anyone who hasn't seen the original episodes.
Second, this is a work being done for free, given away for free, all by fans that are doing what Star Trek fans have always done: create.
TheWolf 359 Projectis a work of fan fiction created by a group of dedicated fans who imagined what the stories of Starfleet officers who survived this battle would sound like. Again, the project was well underway before Shaw unloaded on Admiral Picard. There is nothing this free story would do to cut into Paramount's profit margin or,after recent failures at the box office. One of the co-founders of the project, on social media as the Starfleet Academy Department of History," announced the takedown. Even though we have made $0 off this work, we always knew this was a possibility,"they wrote, adding, it has been wonderful just to be seen for a bit."
And what the CBR post gets right is that the history of Star Trek is one in which its fans and the works they have created have played serious roles in keeping the series popular generally, if not alive. This is stuff that occurred both pre-internet, but also which absolutely took off in the internet era.
The history ofStar Trekis built on a foundation of fan fiction, especially after NBC and Paramount let the show come to an early end after only its third season.Star Trek: TOScreated modern fandom even before the internet was invented. Before the first season was over, fanzines likeSpockanaliawere created on mimeograph machines. Other zines introduced the first slash fiction" so named because of the K/S" that appeared above storieswritten by Spirk shippers. The internet only increasedStar Trek's reach, with Rick Berman saying in an interview onThe Next Generation's complete series DVD that pornography and Star Trek created the internet." Today, entire series of fan-produced films and TV episodes are all over YouTube.
Without dedicated fans creating new and interesting content built off of the Star Trek universe, it's not entirely clear that the series would even have survived to the present day or anywhere near it. The owners of the franchise's IP certainly haven't had a spotless record when it comes to recognizing what it had in these shows, nor the support from fans who came along with them.
And, yet, these companies continuously choose to go to war with their biggest fans, rather than figuring out a way to harness the fandom to build an even bigger universe and, as a result, cash cow. Spock, I would argue, would find all of this... illogical.