mkstewartesq
Sr Member
I'm pretty clueless in the legalities of all this, or the accuracies of any legal claims - here's another look someone posted on Trekbbs:
http://skipoliva.com/index.php/2016/01/03/the-joy-of-copyright-infringement/
Thanks, Willie. This is good reading and will hopefully clear out some of the common misunderstandings that are popping up in the discussions about this case. "Profit" or "making money" is NOT REQUIRED for liability for copyright infringement – heck, even the intent to make the copy is not required (copyright infringement is what is known as a strict liability offense – merely making the copy, even if unintentionally, constitutes copyright infringement under US law. This is how Internet service providers and cloud companies can be held liable for infringing material stored on their servers by users – even though the cloud provider may not even know the information was being stored, their servers automatically made a copy to put it in storage. Even the safe harbors under the law after 1998 only limit the cloud provider's liability for copyright infringement, they do not change the fact that the making of the copy is copyright infringement and the cloud provider is a copyright infringer under the law . )
Of course, unfortunately, this article does not dispel the most laughable theory of defense I've seen posted by more than one person on other boards such as Trekmovie - namely " all of the fan film makers should get together and form a class action that, because CBS has mishandled the franchise with poor product , they have forfeited their copyright in it ." To paraphrase Han Solo from TFA, "that's not how [copyright] works...."
M