tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jul 15 21:33:20 2003
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Re: Klingon and copyright
- From: "Lawrence M. Schoen, Ph.D." <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Klingon and copyright
- Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:28:58 -0400
- User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.1.2418
>Ideally, Paramount would give writers and artists of all sorts liberty
>to do as they pleased, *so long as* it stayed within parameters set by
>Paramount itself.
In a way, they do. It's called Pocket Books. I've just returned from a
weekend spent carousing with a dozen or more Trek authors. All of them have
successfully sold Star Trek fiction, but all of their efforts had to be
vetted/approved by Paramount first. Sometimes such works (books, comics,
scripts) get rejected, or sent back for corrections/revisions.
The point is, Pocket Books is licensed to publish Trek fiction; they pay a
price for that privilege.
Similarly, the KLI is licensed to do certain things (like publish
translations of Shakespeare, as one example), and explicitly constrained
from certain other activities.
You don't have to like it, but copyrights and trademarks exist for a
purpose: to protect the intellectual property of a person or entity. To say
it's not a perfect system is certainly an understatement, but I would argue
that it is nonetheless a better system than the anarchy of letting other
people claim the right to do whatever they choose with someone else's work.
I admit to being torn at times. As a researcher, I would work for years on a
study and then give away the results for free, spreading the insights I'd
acquired to colleagues throughout the scientific community. That's the
nature of scientific endeavor in academia. But nowadays I'm also a
professional author, and while I like to have people reading my fiction, I
also expect to be paid for it.
Bottom line, I think there are some very real possibilities for online short
presentations in Klingon, ventures that would clearly be covered by our
license to produce educational materials. This is vastly different from
longer film productions that would raise hackles on Paramount laywers and
cause of grief. I look forward to discussing this in detail during the
qep'a'.
Lawrence