The lawsuit brought by Paramount and CBS over Axanar, a crowdfunded Star Trek film, continues to chart a course for exploration of the intellectual property galaxy.
To quickly review, Star Trek rights holders, despite tolerating decades of fan-made works, sued Axanar producers led by Alec Peters in December. This drew a motion to dismiss that called upon Paramount and CBS to do a better job describing the copyrighted elements allegedly being infringed. Two weeks ago, Paramount and CBS did just that with a well-decorated amended complaint that claimed ownership to such things as the pointy ears of the Vulcans, the gold shirts and triangular medals that Federation officers wear, and even the language of Klingon.
The latest development is the filing of an amicus brief, written partially in Klingon.
Personally I feel that this lawsuit is a bunch of ylDothjk hgnuth bjalth hgRenno onbva’t jloikk. But that’s just my opinion, of course.
The Vulcan ears and uniform designs probably aren’t copyrightable. They probably are trademarkable, but that ship has long since sailed due to the decades of tolerance.
I’m not sure about the language, though. Is there any precedent for a language being copyrighted?
Doohan had written some lines in Klingon for The Motion Picture, but the language was really developed by Marc Okrand for Paramount. He took the lines and then created a usable vocabulary and grammar for them.
Just going from memory (from Star Log magazine mostly) they had decided to do the scene in The Motion Picture with Spock on Vulcan subtitled with the characters actually speaking Vulcan. But the opening scene with the Klingons had already been shot in English (if you watch the scene the subtitled English dialog matches the actors lip movements perfectly). So somebody thought why not do that scene the same way and James Doohan volunteered to make up some dialog.
Doohan was a talented voice actor. He provided a lot of voices for the original show (uncredited). He was the voice of the M5 computer in The Ultimate Computer, the voice of the mission controller at NASA in the time-travel episode Assignment: Earth, the voice of the Oracle in For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, the voice of Sargon in Return to Tomorrow, and he voiced countless extras for The Animated Series…
