alternatehistory.com

When discussing the popularity of franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who, one must inevitably mention the fandoms around them. Many fans who enjoy the shows decide to produce their own derivative works thereof, and the makers of the shows will occasionally take notice.

While some creators disallow any such works to be made, perhaps most notably Anne Rice, who made a habit of issuing cease-and-desist orders to fanfiction writers, the franchises of Doctor Who and Star Trek have historically been much more forgiving. Both followed the general rule that fan works were perfectly permissible provided that they were not for profit, and that any “mature” works would not be shown to minors.

This is a policy that earned these franchises a great deal of good faith from their fans. Many writers on the modern show had got their start in fan works. Nicholas Briggs, who was in charge of the “Big Finish” audios, and was considered to be the right hand man to Neil Gaiman, had gained notoriety in the fandom during the early 80s with his series of “Audio Visuals” audio dramas. At the time, the stories were distributed on cassette, though the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web meant that its more modern equivalents were starting to be distributed online.


Doctor Who and Star Trek were, in many ways, more suited to having fan works being made than other franchises. There was plenty of time between televised stories for fans to include their own works, and there was ample room for fans to create their own characters, or new versions of characters that had already been introduced. One of the most notable examples is the so-called “Barbara Benedetti Doctor”, named for the actress that portrayed her. The Benedetti Doctor is considered by many fans to be an alternate Sixth Doctor, as her stories were released around the same time as the three Amblin films. The Benedetti Doctor is also notable for being an appearance of a female Doctor, many years before a woman would be cast in the role in the main (British/American) continuity. Many other fan works would follow suit, with occasional productions cropping up more often since the release of the NBC/BBC produced continuation series.

For Star Trek, though no major organised fan work would be released until the early 2000s, with The Voyages of the Lancaster, it was perhaps one of the most notable franchises in terms of fan-fiction. The often derisive term “Mary-Sue” originated from Star Trek fanfiction which often saw author insert characters appear alongside characters from the various shows. Online, many authors decided to follow the voyages of another vessel, rather than create new stories for existing vessels.


Despite the prevalence of these fan works, they were not considered to be legal. Though it often hurt their image, creators who disallowed fan works to be made were entirely within their rights to do so. Though the online archives were proving to be something of a legal grey-area for now, this would be resolved by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The act would be the one of the most important in how copyright, and liability for infringement, would be dealt with in the US until 2014.

1998 would also see the passing of the Copyright Term Extension Act, often nicknamed the “Mickey Mouse Act” given that it prevented the early works featuring that character from entering the public domain. This act would see copyright extended in the US to the life of the author plus 60 years, of for 90 years for works which had no single author. Though this did not go as far as many had hoped, it was still widely criticised and even faced legal challenges.

Fan works would remain a “tolerated but not necessarily legal” area for many years until the passing of the highly controversial 2014 Fair Use Act, made in the aftermath of the ruling in Parkes v. Warner Bros. This act greatly expanded the definition of “Fair Use”, and saw limits placed on how far copyright terms could be extended legally.


Alright, there's a fair bit of OTL here, but it's important stuff. I thought that it was important to mention. There's a good amount of teasing future things here, some very obvious, some less so. I suspect that a lot of you will pick up on all of it, though some of this obviously won't be paid off for a while. There's another supplemental update coming soon about the internet and the current (in-timeline) Dot-Com bubble and the search engines in the timeline. Unsurprisingly, there will be a lot of subtle changes. Some people who failed in OTL will succees, and some people who succeeded in OTL will fail. I'm hoping to get the next DS9 update out soon, but it's taking a bit of time. The writing discussions have a tendency to get sidetracked, and we'll plan something in the future out very well, but do little on what is immediately pertinent. As a result, there's some stuff a couple years down the line that's really fleshed out, and should be really fun to write and hopefully for you to read.