Peters Wades Into Salary, Profit Debate

TRUE Peters’ Salary Lein is correct. Axanar’s own Annual Report documents Peters paid himself a $38,166.57 salary through July 2015 (no financial information since then has been released by Axanar), plus another $3,099 for his actors’ union dues.²⁾

Additionally, in CBS and Paramount’s court filing regarding the defense Motion to Compel Discovery, the studios point to Axanar’s own audit of its finances to allege Axanar “have spent tens of thousands of dollars, raised from Star Trek fans, on personal expenses and [producers’] salaries,” including travel, tires, car insurance, and gas.”³⁾

UNKNOWN Paid Back Salary. Peters’ claim he paid back the salary he paid himself was completely unsubstantiated. Without his release of Axanar's audit turned over to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, there was no way to confirm whether such a payment occurred, how much it totaled nor whether it included money he paid himself since July 2015.

MISLEADING Full-Time Work. Peters justified his salary because he worked full time on his project. However, fan films aren’t supposed to be a fan’s actual job; working full-time is not an expectation of fan productions, which by their nature are not supposed to be someone’s profession, otherwise obviating a project’s status as fan-made. Peters’ choice to devote himself full time to Axanar doesn’t automatically entitle him to draw a salary, particularly since no other known fan production uses its crowdfunding this way.

FALSE It’s About Profit Peters has used the “IRS definition” of profit as justification for why Axanar’s revenue-generating activities should not count as “making money” from its use of Star Trek’s intellectual property. AxaMonitor has already debunked this notion by:

• Documenting Axanar Productions’ status as a for-profit corporation in the state of California.
• Demonstrating Peters’ definition of the term ‘profit’ isn’t relevant to the direct financial benefit he is alleged to have gained from copyright infringement.

This was further supported by federal Judge R. Gary Klausner in dismissing Axanar’s motion to have the lawsuit dismissed. He ruled the idea of profit irrelevant to the analysis of copyright infringement in which Peters gained direct financial benefit from Axanar:

Although it is unclear whether Defendants stand to earn a profit from the Axanar Works, realizing a profit is irrelevant to this analysis. The Court can easily infer that by raising $1 million to produce the Axanar Works and disseminating the Axanar Works on Youtube.com, the allegedly infringing material “acts as a ‘draw’ for customers” to watch Defendants’ films.⁹⁾

PARTLY TRUE/MISLEADING Other Fan Films Paid People While it is true that other fan productions have paid some actors and tradespeople, by and large such films are volunteer affairs. Moreover, no fan production has documented salaries for the producers — the people who run the production — other than Axanar.

MISLEADING Non-Profit Fan Films Peters’ assertion that fan films by definition are not for profit is not based on any clear definition of what a fan film is; in fact, fans have divided into conflicting schools of thoughts regarding revenue from fan works.¹⁰⁾

In Axanar’s case, the idea that a fan production must necessarily be a non-profit is contradicted by its alleged activities designed to create income, some of which involve the manufacture and sale of products based on copyrighted works. In other words, fan films are not for profit until, as asserted by plaintiffs in the Axanar case, they are:

Defendant Peters and his colleagues expressly stated that they were not creating a “fan film.” This case is about a commercial enterprise designed to take money from Star Trek fans, which funds were used to pay Defendant Peters along with his friends and colleagues, to create, as Defendants describe it, “an independent Star Trek film.”¹¹⁾