Small-town Star Trek museum teaches American cultural history, limits of fan fair use in copyright law

I have the con at the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour, Ticonderoga, N.Y., Oct. 2025
(all photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The sleepy town of Ticonderoga, nestled between Lake Champlain and Lake George in upstate New York just south of the Adirondacks, is the unexpected home of a treasure of American history. 

I don't mean the historic Fort Ticonderoga of the American revolutionary era. 

The Star Trek Original Series Set Tour offers visitors an incomparable experience in television history and a lesson in intellectual property law along the way.

Though the transporter was conceived to save money on
prop shots of shuttle landings, it still cost (1966) $600
per effect per person. That's one reason why red shirts
didn't beam down unless they had, let's say, business on
the planet. Regular-cast shots could be recycled. The
platform circles were made with glass from old spotlights.
It's wild to see close up how clever prop crew were with
what they had on hand.

Star Trek in a Small Town 

I've written many times about the relevance of Star Trek to American law and public policy from the civil rights era to today. The Set Tour is the passion project of Star Trek superfan and Ticonderoga native James Cawley, an Elvis impersonator by trade. Cawley is someone who deeply appreciates Trek's cultural importance and has played a role in ensuring that the franchise survives and lives up to its legacy.

Inside the inconspicuous shell of a former Family Dollar in downtown Ticonderoga, Cawley has recreated the Desilu Studios set of the original Star Trek series of the 1960s in astonishing detail, down to the illuminated, colorful "gumdrop" buttons of starship Enterprise control panels.

Little survived from the original 1960s set. At that time, creators still thought about television productions as one-off broadcasts. Syndication was known, but shows were not yet designed for it. Moreover, few critics would have picked Star Trek, a curious experiment in sending Wagon Train to space, as a show that would stand the test of time. 

In fact, Star Trek's perceived ephemerality became a challenge in reconstructing the set, a Set Tour guide explained. The original series had no script supervisor in charge of continuity, mostly because no one expected viewers would see a Star Trek episode for a second time to notice details. A prop that was a scary alien computer in one episode was gently repurposed to be an Enterprise control system in another. Budgets were thin, too, so prop supervisors were ingenious recyclers.

Cawley long collected the few artifacts and set fragments that remained. In the early 1990s, he worked his way into an assistantship with legendary costume designer William Ware Theiss, then working on Star Trek's reincarnation in The Next Generation. Theiss had, and gave to Cawley, discarded blueprints of the 1960s set, as well as original series uniform patterns. Cawley found his calling and embarked on recreation of the set with excruciating attention to detail.

Sickbay: My guide was terrific, knowledgeable and full of lore.
Here the medical scanner is CGI, but in the 1960s, a grip was
needed just to move the little white indicators up and down
from behind the wall.

A Golden Age of Fan Fiction 

Homage to the past, though, was not Cawley's sole design. In the early 20-aughts, he became the founding producer and "Captain Kirk" star of a Star Trek fan production, New Voyages, later known as Star Trek: Phase II. The highly regarded fan franchise published online 10 episodes from 2004 to 2016, and many original series talents contributed to the show, such as writer David Gerrold and actors George Takei (Hikaru Sulu), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), and Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand).

That's where things get interesting from the intellectual property perspective.

Star Trek brand owners Paramount, CBS, and Viacom—their corporate relationships shifted over the years—had mixed feelings about Star Trek fan productions. There were many, though none besides New Voyages had fixed sets.

When Star Trek's popularity waned, fan fiction kept the franchise alive in public imagination. As long as fan projects were not for profit, the corporations were content to look the other way, even striking an agreement at one time with New Voyages. But when Paramount, et al., were on the verge of a new Star Trek TV or film project, they tightened the reins.

The corporate equivocation, in tandem with a committed and creative fan base, allowed Star Trek fan fiction to thrive in a way that is uncommon in the American entertainment space. Nevertheless, corporate indulgence started to wane after J.J. Abrams took the helm of the 2009 film Star Trek and revitalized the franchise. 

 The recreation of Engineering is two stories high, as was the
original after it was augmented for Original Series season 2.
The warp core is about 12 feet deep but looks deeper
because of a forced-perspective design to fool the camera.

Copyright Showdown

Things came to a head in 2015. Alec Peters, an actor in Phase II, raised money and excitement around a new fan-film project, Star Trek: Axanar, teased by a compelling 2014 short, Prelude to Axanar (IMDb). With advances in technology, the production quality of fan films was by then quite good. Paramount meanwhile was closing in on 2016 release of a new feature film in the reboot universe, Star Trek Beyond, and a new TV series, Star Trek: Discovery, was slated for launch in 2017. In the last days of 2015, Paramount sued Peters and the Axanar project for copyright infringement.

The copyright case, and to a lesser extent the trademark case, on fan fiction is really open and shut. Profitable or not, the take-offs are not permissible without license by the rights-holder. There is a fuzzy line at the outer boundary of copyright, where protection of creative product gives way to "the scènes à faire doctrine." But it's not that fuzzy.

Law school learning on copyright impresses on students that eligible works must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." That does not mean, however, that only that which is committed to print or film is what is copyrighted.

Fictional facts and storylines also may come within copyright protection. Thus, the estate of Anne Rice can claim copyright over the story of a young vampire who shacks up with the master who turned him, adopts a vampire child, and later gives a tell-all interview. But the scènes à faire doctrine ensures that copyright does not remove mere tropes from the public domain. The Rice estate cannot claim copyright infringement in all stories about blood-sucking, undead creatures who cannot tolerate sunlight.

To put that in Star Trek terms, anyone is free to write a story about a human-led inter-species alliance of space-faring civilizations that explores the galaxy and maintains uneasy relations with warlike enemies. But the closer the author gets to a San Francisco-headquartered federation of planets with warp-drive starships, transporters, phasers, and emotion-averse characters with pointy ears, the more the risk of copyright infringement. The line is fuzzy, but it's not wide.

The problem for fan fiction always is that the stories fans want to tell are the stories that explore the boundaries of the established narrative, the existing fictional universe, and ideally, of the recognizable characters in it. That's exactly what copyright does not allow. 

Many scholars have argued for more expansive interpretation of fair use to allow for fan creativity in the presence of clear disclaimer. There's a whole book about the problem of fan fiction in historical and multi-national perspective by California Western Law Professor Aaron Schwabach. The last chapter of Schwabach's book is titled tellingly, "Fanfic: The New Voyages."

Archivist and professor emeritus in cinema studies at NYU, formerly at UCLA, Howard Besser made the case as to Star Trek in particular, besides other popular properties, such as Harry Potter, that the public commons should be larger. He called out corporate owners such as Viacom and Paramount for overreach with unjustifiably aggressive cease-and-desist letters.

But the fact and law remain, protection of fan work that plainly takes place in the same universe as copyrighted works, even when disclaiming ownership and avoiding recognizable names of fictional places and characters, and omitting trademarked titles, still is a non-starter. The analysis is of the totality. Nena may invoke Captain Kirk passingly in "99 Luftballons," but a fan film in the Star Trek universe treads too far.

The Treaty of Axanar 

It was no surprise, then, that the federal court in Paramount Pictures Corp. and CBS Studios, Inc. v. Axanar Productions, Inc. and Alec Peters refused the defendants' motion to dismiss in May 2016. The case over Axanar was careening toward a jury trial, the parties arguing heatedly over evidence and jury instructions, when suddenly, in the third week of January 2017, Paramount and Peters settled.

Out of the Axanar settlement came a remarkable new document, which articulated and still states the boundaries around what Paramount and CBS will tolerate in Star Trek fan fiction. The guidelines stated severe new limits, including:

• The duration of a fan production is limited to 15 minutes, or one story in two parts for 30 minutes, "with no additional seasons, episodes, parts, sequels or remakes."
• The work may not have "Star Trek" in the main title and must be subtitled, "A STAR TREK FAN PRODUCTION."
• No Star Trek content content may be used, and Star Trek-recognizable costumes and props must be official Star Trek merchandise.
• No creator or actor ever employed in a licensed Star Trek production may work on the project, and no one working on the project may be paid.
• A production must be non-commercial with a budget from fundraising limited to $50,000.

Described by fan fiction enthusiasts as "draconian," the new guidelines made impossible the production of projects fans had come to love. It seemed that no film such as Axanar could proceed. Serial projects such as Phase II had to call it quits. The golden age of streaming Star Trek fan fiction was over.

Prelude to Axanar
movie poster
(presumed ©; illustrative use)

Axanar Fal-Tor-Pan?

Yet, for better or worse, the Paramount-CBS guidelines were far from the last word on Axanar. Secret arbitration over money raised for Axanar followed the 2017 settlement. In 2023, Paramount sued Peters in California Superior Court in Los Angeles, alleging that he never stopped raising money for an Axanar film, and asking the court to affirm the outcome of the arbitration. 

Peters did not appear, and the court entered Paramount's desired order in February 2024. Rights-holder copyright consultant Jonathan Bailey, founder of CopyByte, wrote about the case for his Plagiarism Today. Fans follow developments around Peters and Axanar in the public Facebook group page, AxaMonitor.

Meanwhile, production on Axanar most definitely continued. Six days after Paramount had its way in court in Los Angeles, Axanar wrapped filming on its set, Jonathan Lane reported on his Fan Film Factor. Peters himself gives monthly updates on Axanar on YouTube. 

In the October 2025 Axanar update, posted on October 17, Peters reported on post-production progress on the latest installment of Axanar, to follow Prelude. He referenced the lawsuit, thereby suggesting that subsequent "episodes" (not "films") might comply with the Paramount-CBS guidelines. If that's what he meant, then a single episode Axanar cannot exceed 15 minutes, shorter than Prelude's 21 minutes, and there can be only two. Yet Peters described Prelude as mere "proof of concept." Confirming Paramount's 2015 fears, Peters said that Prelude was designed to demonstrate that a fan work could be of such high quality as to be technically indistinguishable from an official studio product.

The ultimate extent of Peters's fealty to the guidelines is unclear. I wonder whether he regards them indeed as mere "guidelines"—like the 1976 copyright fair use guidelines that, in my opinion, courts have too often misapplied as hard lines. In the October update, Peters talked about beta testing a new fundraising website. I wonder further whether he's exceeded the cap of the guidelines. He encouraged fan financial support at the Axanar website.

There was really only one corridor for every corridor shot.
Signs and wall fixtures could be changed, and it curved
(behind camera here) for an illusion of more space.

A New New Voyage

The Axanar debacle in 2016 left Cawley in an awkward spot. His one-of-a-kind set reconstruction had little remaining practical use for filming after Phase II folded. Yet adoring fans would bask in the extravagance of the work. He conceived of the Set Tour. Still, without official imprimatur, he would risk legal jeopardy by opening to the public. 

Cawley invited Paramount execs to Ticonderoga to have a look. No doubt, they were skeptical going in. But, at least as a Set Tour guide told the story, the execs were so impressed with Cawley's loving attention to detail that they agreed to license the Star Trek name. Thus, the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour is not, as I had first suspected, a trademark infringement flying under the radar in tiny Ticonderoga. Set Tour tour guides will not volunteer information about Phase II or other fan productions. Whether they're just playing it safe, or that was an agreement with Paramount, I do not know. But guides will answer questions about Phase II if asked.

The Star Trek Set Tour has a deceptively modest exterior.

To Cawley's credit, he always played ball with Star Trek owners. Remember, it was New Voyages that reached an express understanding with Paramount, before Axanar came along. Cawley came by the 1960s set plans honestly, by all accounts, while working for Theiss on the official franchise. And the Captain Kirk of eight New Voyages episodes even scored a cameo as a bridge officer in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek. The Set Tour has hosted original series cast members as guest tour guides. The original Captain Kirk, ninety-four-year-old William Shatner, is expected back in November 2025.

There is, by the way, a USS Ticonderoga in Star Trek, though accounts differ over whether the name is a nod to Cawley, American history, a real-life Ticonderoga, or all of the above. Five U.S. Navy ships have borne the name Ticonderoga, including an aircraft carrier that distinguished itself in World War II and the Vietnam War. In the 1970 epic war film Tora! Tora! Tora!, the Essex-class Ticonderoga served as a set for the slightly smaller Yorktown-class aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6, not the later, nuclear-powered Enterprise carrier built in 1961). A great many other Navy carriers lent their names to Star Trek starships, including the Lexington, Saratoga, and Yorktown in The Original Series.

I had a (phaser) blast of a good time at the Star Trek Original Set Tour earlier this month. On my way home from the American Society of Comparative Law annual conference in Montreal, walking through a wonderland of Gene Roddenberry optimism about humanity's future was a welcome antidote to Professor James Q. Whitman's gloomy prognosis for rule of law in the United States.

Set Tour visitors get a turn in the captain's chair amid Cawley's breathtaking recreation of the classic bridge of the starship Enterprise. Ironically in revolutionary-historical Ticonderoga, amid relics from an imaginary future, I've never felt more a part of American history.

(All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

The Set Tour has tons of artifacts, including ship models, props, and uniforms. Some of the props are recreations, but made so well that they were used in throwback, time-travel episodes, such as Deep Space Nine's 30th anniversary "Trials and Tribble-ations"—besides fan shows such as Phase II.

UMass Law Review hosts vibrant media law symposium

Today, as advertised, the UMass Law Review hosted a symposium on media law. The program videos are all on Facebook Live.  Check my Twitter feed for hot links to speakers' handles.  Three panels were organized by media "platform," from politics to digital to entertainment, raising issues from the investigative journalism to data breach law to streaming music copyright.  The program concluded with a keynote address by Richard P. Flaggert, a DLA Piper media attorney.  Here are some highlights:

After a thoughtful welcome by UMass Law Dean Eric Mitnick, UMass Law Professor Jeremiah Ho started the program with a discussion of why media matter.  The problem of law and policy, he said, is the gulf between "what matters" and "what excites us," with the media business model tending to cater to the latter.  Professor Ho is a co-adviser of the UMass Law Review.

  

Kicking off the first panel of the day, Rep. Christopher Markey, New Bedford, Mass., attorney, Commonwealth legislator, and UMass Law alumnus, gave the political perspective.  Money has distorted news from being an educational tool to being entertainment, he explained.  People must be media literate to elicit truth from what they see, hear, and read.  Recalling his years as a district attorney, Markey said that attorneys and judges were "better" when a beat reporter was sitting in the courtroom, that journalism "makes government better."  But those beat reporters are no longer there.

Jillian Fennimore provided her perspective from inside the busy office of Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.  A journalism graduate of the University of New Hampshire with many years experience in media, Fennimore explained the challenge of making the work of the state's law office intelligible and meaningful to citizens, whether the subject matter is investigation of the opioid crisis, antitrust enforcement, or protection of a consumer whose vacuum cleaner broke.  AG Healey cares about all of these things because she understands that these are things people care about, Fennimore said.  My Torts II class has been looking at the impact of the Healey opioid investigation on the crisis and litigation nationwide.

Peter Ubertaccio, a dean and political scientist at Stonehill College, gave an academic perspective on news and media law.  Those of us of a certain age remember the local TV news anchors of our youth, he observed.  That is not true for our children.  Journalism today is "atomized," lacking the "rhythm" of television before the information age, even if the internet is "democratiz[ing]."  There is more content available through more conduits than ever before, Ubertaccio explained, yet there is less availability of accurate information.  We are entering a golden age of television entertainment while at the same time entering a dark age of information, he said.  Incidentally, yes, I remember my anchors.  And I was privileged to have worked with Baltimore's great Al Sanders for a short time before he passed away.

A star of the first panel was Dee DeQuattro, UMass Law alumna, staff attorney for Operation Stand Down Rhode Island, and creator of the Boots on the Ground Heroes Memorial.  DeQuattro talked about her experiences in radio and television, most recently as an assignment manager for ABC6 News in Providence, Rhode Island, then her transition to a public relations and later legal capacity for the veterans organization, Operation Stand Down.  DeQuattro went to journalism school to hold power accountable in the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein, she said.  But "news doesn't work that way anymore," as bottom-line focused detracted from serious political reporting.  After covering the Boston Marathon bombing, she went to law school.  She still uses her familiarity with news media, driven by money savings and visual imagery, to manage public affairs in her nonprofit work.

Law Review co-adviser Professor Dwight Duncan moderated the second panel, on digital media.  Professor Andrew Beckerman-Rodau of Suffolk Law School and the Intellectual Property Center opened with a comprehensive overview of data protection, including data breach and Big Data analytics, in American law today.

Attorney Hollie Lussier of Bristol County Savings Bank told the audience about the large role data protection and privacy play in legal practice today, especially in the financial sector.  She warned attorneys to consider insurance liability limits, as $100,000, she said, won't cut it.  She cited a recent case of a "small" data breach that nevertheless generated a $140 million loss.  The breach could have been prevented, she said, with a $10,000 "penetration test."  Making matters more hazardous, she explained, many insurance policies will not cover consequential damages, which make up most of that mega-million loss.

Rhode Island attorney and legislator Stephen Ucci concurred on the importance of data protection to contemporary practice.  He referenced a recent in case in which only 300 records were exposed.  Despite seemingly straightforward facts, the exposure of data has different implications for each data subject, he explained; moreover, breach across state borders implicates the laws of 50 states as well as federal laws, such as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act.  The complexity of even a small case is thus multiplied.  Ucci discussed the data breach legislation adopted by Rhode Island in 2015 and plans to beef up education and implementation in the near future.

UMass Law Professor Dustin Marlan moderated the third panel, on the subject of entertainment law.  Attorney and educator Richard Kent Berger started off the afternoon program talking about music copyright.  He explained the significance of the Music Modernization Act of 2018 and related legislation and pending proposals.  Royalties are now owed for digital streaming, and some pre-1972 musical works that had lost copyright protection have had their authors' royalty rights restored.  The law also revamped the approach to orphan works and afford them greater protection against loss of copyright.  Previously large content providers such as Google's YouTube were able to use a notice process on a massive scale to shake potentially orphaned works free of their copyright protection.

Seattle University Law Professor Bryan Adamson, a mass media scholar, talked about the importance of framing in media, especially in news reporting, and especially in coverage of protest movements. Media frames tend to perpetuate social stability, he explained, and as a result, tend to perpetuate racial hegemony.  The portrayals viewers see might not fairly represent the facts, and, as a result, he said, rather than contributing to the public dialog, media narratives might "derail" meaningful discussion of sensitive topics such as race and social and economic equality.

Rhode Island attorney Richard E. Kühn talked about the importance of social media to attorneys.  Social media are part of contemporary legal practice across the board, he explained, touching on areas including lawyer advertising, client counseling, evidentiary investigation and spoliation, and trial practice and voir dire.  He recited recent case rulings demonstrating that failure to take social media into account, for example in evidentiary investigation, may result in a finding of legal malpractice.

DLA Piper attorney Richard P. Flaggert (not speaking on behalf of clients or the firm) gave the keynote address of the symposium, discussing contemporary media law practice.  Flaggert, who is licensed in California, Massachusetts, and England and Wales, started off by reminding that Shakespeare's "kill all the lawyers" lines was an admonition against unethical or incompetent practice, not actually an indictment of the professional.

He then spoke about two key doctrinal developments in media law practice.  First, he discussed the potential impact on free speech and commerce of the newly adopted EU Copyright Directive, in particular the article 11 "link tax" and the article 13 "upload filter measure."  Both threaten a chilling effect, he explained.  The former purports to give copyright protection to even a "snippet"—the actual word, undefined in the law—of content, putting at risk a range of content from Google news aggregation to "your blog."  Meanwhile article 13 imposes the burden of protecting against copyright infringement on ISPs, abandoning reliance on the notice-and-takedown approach of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  As a result, even "your blog" content might be tied up for weeks or longer as ISPs mull over whether you have violated copyright, likely prompting prophylactic censorship.  I note: not unlike Europe's approach to the right to be forgotten, now miring Google in a new administrative bureaucracy, not to mention the risk of Goliath gate-keeping under non-transparent private-sector control.  

Second, Flaggert talked about the problem of copyright and live fan captures of sporting events and the like.  As technology improves and recording devices become harder to detect and control, event providers such as sporting authorities will have a more difficult time policing the difference between the odd fan photo and the HD-streaming pirate.  The French solution has been to regulate, Flaggert explained, giving near absolute control to providers, a strategy of obviously problematic dimension.  Meanwhile in the United States, no body of intellectual property law, such as federal copyright or state common law, seems up to addressing the problem.  Event providers are confounded at the choice between loss of control of their intellectual property and alienation of their fan base with its abiding affection for social media.  Meanwhile the problem poses a threat to our fine-line precedents and the delicate balance between INS v. AP IP rights and the "hot news" doctrine, which has kept the peace for decades.

The village idiot moderated the first panel. Here
he is about to laugh at one of his own bad jokes.

Once a lawyer who represented ESPN before it ceded its design to bring Premier League coverage to America, I asked Flaggert 1:1 whether NBC, with its unsatisfying and impossibly expensive array of cannibalized Premiere League coverage for U.S. viewers, intends to be destroying soccer in America, or is just doing so indifferently.  He shared his frustration with access to Liverpool matches.  I'm not sure why one would necessarily want to see Liverpool, unless they were playing directly against ManC.  But I appreciate his empathy.

A big congratulations to the UMass Law Review, especially editor Casey Shannon, for executing a superb symposium, with my sincere thanks for bringing these talents to our campus.

CFP: UMass Law Review calls for papers, presentations in law and media

The UMass Law Review has issued the following call for papers. Download the call in PDF here, and please share it with any interested scholarly communities.

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LAW REVIEW
CALL FOR SYMPOSIUM PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS

November 14, 2018

We are pleased to announce the 2019 UMass Law Review Roundtable Symposium, currently titled “Law and Media.” In the age where the 24/7 news cycle and social media have impacted current politics and where data protection, personal branding, and technology have affected entertainment and media as well as the rule of law, an investigation of the relationship between law and the media of our current times is timely and warranted. Accordingly, the UMass Law Review seeks thoughtful, insightful, and original presentations relating to the impact of the law on media as well as the impact of media on the law.

Interested participants should submit a 500-word abstract to cshannon@umassd.edu, with “Attn: Conference Editor – Symposium Submission” in the subject line by December 31st, 2018 for consideration. Selected participants will be notified by the end of January and invited to present their work at the 2019 UMass Law Review Symposium taking place in late March of 2019. Selected participants may also submit a scholarly work for potential publication in the 2019-2020 UMass Law Review Journal. If you have questions about submissions or the Symposium, please contact our Business/Conference Editor, Casey Shannon or Editor-In-Chief, Kayla Venckauskas (kvenckauskas@umassd.edu). We thank you in advance for your submission.

Sincerely,

Kayla Venckauskas
Editor-in-Chief

Casey Shannon
Business/Conference Editor