Star Trek owners settle with Axanar fan-film makers

It was merely a month ago that we first heard how Paramount Pictures, owner of the Star Trek trademark and franchise, was looking to halt production on fan-film Star Trek: Axanar, claiming ownership of the Klingon language in the process. Now though we've learned that it's halting that legal action, having settled with the film's producers.

Paramount's original claim was that the film, Star Trek: Axanar – the feature length follow up to Prelude to Axanar – infringed on its copyright. Although there are a lot of themes in Star Trek that are not copyrightable, Paramount claimed it owned the rights to several ship designs, the Klingon language and various other aspects of the Star Trek Universe.

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However the whole thing has become much more amicable now, we're told. Director of the latest Star Trek movies, J.J. Abrams himself made the announcement at a fan-event last week.

“We started talking about this realizing that this is not an appropriate way to deal with the fans. The fans should be celebrating this thing,” he said (via Deadline).

It wasn't Abrams who made the move to halt these proceedings though, but director of upcoming Star Trek: Beyond, Justin Lin. Abrams described how Lin went to the studio and managed to convince the executives to stop the lawsuits in its tracks.

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The director of Axanar, Alex Peters later posted a message detailing how happy he was at the news and expressed his thanks for the actions of both Abrams and Lin (as per TorrentFreak).

Moving forward, both parties still need to find an amicable agreement as to how Axanar will proceed. It may be that there are certain aspects of the Star Trek universe that Paramount doesn't want used, but as long as everyone can agree on a few points, we should see the fan film finished before long.

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KitGuru Says: Here's hoping whatever the settlement is, that the Axanar producers don't get bent over too much. There's a lot of money and legal expertise behind Paramount, it's not like fan-film producers can easily compete with that. It was lucky they had the Star Trek directors on their side. 

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