October 4 2018
The Axanar world has largely gone back to sleep.
AxaMonitor’s FB group is still going strong and visitors will find a wide range of topics from Tardigrades to Con jokes to not getting said joke to Russian trolls and more.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for AxaCon either for or against, the ticket price separation from SphinxCon will appeal to Axanar fans or Star Trek fans and those who buy the combo ticket can get to sample SphinxCon as well.
Trekzone scored a coup and that coup is an interview with Stage 9 lead Rob Bryan on the program ‘A Trekzone Conversation‘ and you can listen to the chat by pressing play on the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTlRtRCINdA
If you didn’t know what Stage 9 was, it was a virtual reality tour of the USS Enterprise-D and it was visually stunning, we tried v0.0.9 and thought it was cool even if pushed the limits of our humble computer.
The coolest thing was perhaps the fact you could change the bridge to one from either Season 1, Seasons 2 to 7, Yesterday’s Enterprise, All Good Things and Generations.
The short story is that TPTB found it to cross the line presumably because of the use of established characters or a professional company has or is continuing to do something similar and so they gave Stage 9 a cease & desist order and Stage 9 complied rather than fighting it.
Axanar have given their take on the Stage 9 situation on Twitter, they have 16 retweets and 57 likes.
There seems to be a bit of worry creeping in now, what is acceptable in the eyes of CBS and Paramount outside of the Fan Film Guidelines? There is suggestions that Stage 9 Studios (different and unrelated to the computer program Stage 9) may come under fire because they got a Fan Appreciation Weekend coming up and it may be trodding on the toes of officialdom.
The perceived problem with Stage 9 Studios is that James Cawley’s Set Tour is the only game in town in terms of set touring thanks to it being licensed by CBS and so it is suggested it should get shut down.
Don’t use likenesses of actors, don’t use film or television scenes, don’t do what the professionals are doing like VR games, don’t have a donate button on your website, don’t do set tours of any kind at least don’t label it one maybe call it a gathering with a nice backdrop.
Basically cut down all the possible chances that somebody in an office somewhere may get upset and cut down your expressions of love for Star Trek.
Until next time, it is back to watching Bugs Bunny.
Mentioning Trekkie Mentions 
Who is perceiving that part of the problem has to do with James’ sets? I haven’t seen that anywhere and it’s pretty ridiculous.
The two most likely reasons are an existing license with Ubisoft and use of actor likenesses.
The guidelines were specific to fan films. There’s nothing for audio or print or VR so anyone making assumptions that the guidelines will be similar is just silly. The fact there are no guidelines for those media makes it more likely they’ll be shut down.
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There are two totally different and unrelated Stage 9’s, one is the VR effort and the other makes fan films.
The one that makes fan films is having a fan appreciation weekend and people can go tour what is there etc and the comment made was that if they’re doing that then wouldn’t James be angry because he has the set tour license.
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Ah, fair point. Forgot they shared a name.
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