Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Paramount probably felt that they HAD to do it to protect their trademarks. In the US, if someone violates your trademark and you fail to take action, a third party can use that as evidence that the term has entered the language as an everyday expression. That happened to trademarked names like "aspirin", which is no longer a trademark in the US, because the courts ruled that the trademark holder had failed to take action to protect it from unauthorised use.
I would imagine that, at the time, the various trademarks associated with Star Trek were an extremely valuable commodity.
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Well, I don't know their reason. I know that I had friends who worked at ISPs who were basically told by Paramount lawyers to delete someone's account in its entirety, or they will be sued. Most of these ISPs were barely making money back then, and were run by people who were more fans of the internet than actually businessmen (That came later.) When they were threatened like that, they reacted by doing exactly what they were extorted to do. It was heavy handed.
But I mean, think of the long term effects here. IF you were born in 1995, around when all this was happening, and you became 10 in 2005.. and let's just accept that that was the "age of sentience" or something along that line.. that means in 2005 , here is what you had:
You had the last season of Enterprise, which was, frankly, a pitiful show.
That's it. That's all the star trek a 10 year old born in 1995 has had an oppurtunity to see live. You do have about twenty novels or so, spread out amongst the product line from 2005 to now.. and you have a myriad of cancelled game projects. There's the movie coming out in 2009 which supposedly would kick off a new product line.
Now, imagine that Paramount didn't go out of the way to alienate their fanbase in the 90s. Can you imagine what this fandom would look like?
The thing is, the Paramount move wasn't about Fanfiction. It was about Paramount's "official" star trek fan club. They wanted everyone in that, and were glad to "sanction" websites that were paying members of the club. They loved to have fiction sent to those people. They had a limited set of graphics, a huge copyright statement, and a bunch of mandatory links, but you could have an official fan site if you wanted one.
(Added in edit)
Forgot to add this part. Not only would Paramount shut down the fan sites, but they would also shut down websites that talked about Paramount shutting down the fan sites. They claimed their C&D letters were copyrighted materials, and that it was illegal to discuss the contents of them with anyone outside legal counsel or Paramount. So even what they were DOING was under cloak of darkness, which is why it's so hard to find things related to the crackdown even today.. because they STILL go after sites that talk about it.
(Added in edit)
Fanfiction had very little to do with the crackdown. Sure, some sites that had fanfiction were shut down.. but a lot more sites that were just "I like Star Trek, WHEE!" sites were too. It'd be as if Amazon came here and shut this site down because we talk about the Kindle, and they have official forums for that and they don't want us talking about it here.
Paramount even tried to shut down USENET before someone in their legal team figured out that Usenet was more "hydra like" than they could handle.
All in all, it was a mess. It was corporate greed, and now look at what the company is trying to do to get back fans.
MANGA. That's right, Manga, staring characters from TOS.