Star Trek New Voyages (and Star Trek Continues, to a lesser extent) were beautiful, and I'm so glad that they existed and I'm deeply upset with Paramount for fucking them up.

(There are 3! Episodes of Star Trek New Voyages that will never get finished because between them being shot and being released, they became explicitly illegal.)

Of course, this is because they were always illegal. They were copyright infringing, it just didn't matter until Paramount decided that fan films had gotten too good, and posed a real threat to their bottom line.

I don't think I can fully explain how much Paramount's capricious fan film guidelines radicalized me w/r/t my views on copyright.

Of course, both New Voyages on occasion and Continues in most (every?) episode featured Vic Mignogna as Captain Kirk.

I have heard from credible sources that, in addition to being a first class creep ( see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Mignogna#Legal_battles_and_sexual_harassment_allegations ) he was also probably a thief!

I feel like I shouldn't continue this discussion without acknowledging that.

Anyway, problematic people aside, the concept of these Star Trek fan films was beautifully naive: "let's do Fan Fiction but for Television"

Fan fiction is also illegal, and usually tolerated at best. (It shouldn't be illegal, but that's another story!) and that's while most Fan Fiction could not possibly supplant the work who's copyright it is infringing. Who would read Fan Fic without reading/watching the thing its based on?

At the time that Star Trek New Voyages started coming out there hadn't been any Star Trek on TV or in cinemas for years, and the early episodes of NV... Well, they are a little unpolished, rough around the edges.

But, by the time the later episodes were released, and by the time Continues hit the scene, two things had changed:

1) these fan films became absolutely as good as or better than many episodes of Star Trek that had aired on television (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TC5wl0IzE&list=PL5h4ur_aSq8NxKIK0TWk6puXu4E1RjT8y&index=5 or any of the later episodes for example.)

2) J.J. Abrams' Star Trek film was released, and quickly became a blockbuster trilogy of ... well, shall we say "Flashy" films?

In short, there was money on the line.

And the reception of the Abrams films was mixed. You wouldn't know it looking at their reviews today, but opinions were Divided.

Casual viewers ate them up, but hardcore fans absolutely hated it. And they were Loud. They weren't critics, they weren't viewers. They didn't make the films fail, but they did Talk. A lot. On youtube, and in comic book shops, and in letters to Paramount.

And, I can't speak for every one of those nerd, but at least the ones around me were *firmly* of the opinion that the true spirit of Star Trek lived on, not in the cinema but in the fan films on youtube.

I'm not talking about Axanar, because I frankly don't know enough about it to talk about it cogently.

I know this: They raised $638,000 on Kickstarter to make a feature length film based on IP they didn't own. They had various alumni of previous Trek projects involved.

Somehow, they thought this wouldn't attract the attention of the *people who owned and were actively making movies with the same IP*

I can't fathom being that reckless.

In the wake of that, it is unsurprising that Paramount chose to publish rules governing fan films.

What is slightly more surprising is that the rules they published also explicitly banned Star Trek New Voyages / Continues, etc.

It isn't *that* surprising, Paramount wanted to make money and New Voyages / Continues were both good enough that they could be seen as viable competition to the things they were producing,.

And it would have been difficult to write rules that excluded Axanar that didn't also exclude NV/Continues, but they didn't even try.

They used Axanar as an excuse to axe all fan films.