Twelve years is a long wait for a sequel – long enough that Richard Hatch, who played the Klingon commander Kharn in the original short, did not live to see the follow-up. Still, on 26 July 2026 Axanar: The Gathering Storm finally premiered at a small San Diego cinema over Comic-Con weekend and went up on YouTube, where it pulled in around 120,000 views in two days. On 29 July it vanished, removed after a copyright request from Paramount and CBS. Nobody on the production was surprised. Asked about the odds of a takedown, the team had put the over/under at 36 hours. For the record, the lawyers took about 72.
Axanar is the fan-film world’s answer to Jarndyce v Jarndyce. Back in 2014 the in-universe ‘documentary’ Prelude to Axanar was so slick that its makers went on to raise more than a million dollars from fans for a full-length feature, at which point Paramount and CBS sued. Among their complaints was the use of Klingon, which prompted the Language Creation Society to file a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that nobody can copyright a language – written partly in Klingon, and finding room for The Big Lebowski‘s ‘This will not stand, man’ rendered as ‘not Qam ghu’vam‘. J.J. Abrams told fans the suit would be dropped. It was not. Instead the studios published fan-film guidelines that read like surrender terms dictated from orbit: fundraising capped at $50,000, no more than two 15-minute episodes, no ‘Star Trek’ in the title, and no actors who have ever appeared in the real thing. A judge found the film to be a derivative work, and the two sides settled in early 2017, days before trial. The peace did not hold. Paramount went to arbitration in 2022 over alleged breaches, and in 2023 the arbitrator ruled in the studio’s favour and awarded it nearly $300,000 in costs. Producer Alec Peters now says the latest takedown itself breaches the 2017 deal and has promised to fight, while the final instalment, Crucible, is still due.
It is quite a change for a franchise whose fandom was born in duplicated fanzines in the late 1960s, and whose owners spent decades looking politely the other way. The new caution has even reached people who never pointed a camera. In 2018 Stage 9, a volunteer project building an explorable virtual recreation of the Next Generation Enterprise, received a cease and desist letter from CBS. Nobody was charging a penny for it. It was a starship no one could actually fly, built by people who loved it, and scuttled by a letter.
A galaxy far, far away got there first. In 1981 Lucasfilm became alarmed at what fanzines were doing with Han and Leia, and Maureen Garrett, who ran the official fan club, sent out a series of letters laying down the law on adult content. Gay stories fared worst of all: one zine editor was told Lucasfilm ‘cannot authorize homosexual expression of love among the characters created by George Lucas’. At least one veteran editor quit Star Wars fandom altogether, explaining that a friend had summed up the affair with a line about the Clone Wars: ‘The Clones won.’ In fairness, the Empire occasionally calls off its own stormtroopers. In 2019, when a Disney-linked music publisher claimed the score of Star Wars Theory’s self-funded Vader fan film, Lucasfilm stepped in to have the claim lifted, honouring its original deal: make the film, but nobody makes a penny from it.
Hogwarts went straight for the children. Around the turn of the millennium, as the first film was being shot, Warner Bros sent legal letters to Potter fan sites, many of them run by youngsters barely into their teens. That proved a tactical error, because one of those fans was Heather Lawver, a teenager with a knack for handling the press. Her Defense Against the Dark Arts campaign and merchandise boycott embarrassed the studio into withdrawing the letters. Reference books fared less well. In 2008, when former school librarian Steven Vander Ark tried to turn his Harry Potter Lexicon website into a printed book, Rowling sued and called it ‘wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work’. The judge blocked publication and awarded $6,750 in statutory damages, while going out of his way to say that reference guides to literature ought generally to be encouraged. A trimmed edition eventually appeared. Anyone who maintains a fan wiki should note that this particular line was drawn by an actual federal judge. Warners has shown it can be reasonable, mind: when the Italian team behind Voldemort: Origins of the Heir had their Kickstarter shut down, a non-profit deal followed and the film went up free on YouTube in 2018.
The BBC’s turn was the most British of the lot, because it involved knitting. In 2008 a Doctor Who fan called Mazzmatazz shared free patterns for knitted Adipose and Ood; when chancers began selling them on eBay, the BBC sent her a cease and desist letter. A story in The Times and a predictable outbreak of national indignation followed, and the Corporation softened its line and started talking about licensing instead. A broadcaster backing down in the face of knitters is about as gentle as this stuff gets.
And then there is Nottingham. Games Workshop has been at this long enough to have a back catalogue. In 2009 it ordered BoardGameGeek to take down fan-made players’ aids. Its long legal war with the add-on maker Chapterhouse Studios ended in 2013 with a split jury verdict and a modest $25,000 in damages – rather less than total victory. When the Warhammer+ streaming service launched in 2021, new IP guidelines declared that individuals ‘must not create fan films or animations based on our settings and characters’, which went down especially badly given that the service had recruited talent first spotted through exactly that kind of fan work. In July 2025 the cosplay prop-maker Galactic Armory received a cease and desist two days before GW unveiled its own official, wearable Lieutenant Titus helmet, and pulled its Warhammer designs. Its founder took it with remarkable grace, likening himself to a little bird cleaning a crocodile’s teeth, well aware the jaws might snap shut at any moment. Over in Spain, meanwhile, rival Corvus Belli hands fans 3D models of its miniatures and all but begs them to animate something.
Authors have bared their teeth too. In 2000 Anne Rice announced that she did not allow fan fiction, and her characters were promptly scrubbed from FanFiction.net. Marion Zimmer Bradley went the other way for years, printing fans’ stories in official Darkover anthologies – until a 1992 dispute with a fan over a similar plot cost her an unpublished novel, and her lawyer told her to stop permitting fan fiction altogether. Writers have cited the episode as a cautionary tale ever since.
Line the cases up and a pattern emerges. The lawyers rarely care about a fan who is merely in love with a universe. The trouble starts when the fan gets too good, too well funded, or too close to something the rights holder wants to sell – a feature film, a subscription channel, a very expensive helmet. The law mostly sits on the studios’ side, since any fan work is, almost by definition, derivative. Yet every one of these franchises was kept warm through its lean years by people writing zines, running websites and knitting monsters for nothing. The studios know it, which is why they lurch between benevolence and the boot. That doesn’t make the boot feel any better.
Here at SFcrowsnest we have been writing about other people’s universes since 1991, so, for the avoidance of doubt: Qapla’. Used without permission, and very much in the proper spirit of the thing.
Join the conversation (0)