Paramount Pictures Corp. (commonly known as Paramount Studios or simply Paramount), is one of the two named plaintiffs in the legal complaint against Alec Peters and Axanar Productions, producers of the short Star Trek film, Prelude to Axanar and the feature Axanar, formerly Star Trek: Axanar.

While CBS is the current copyright owner of the Star Trek brand, entitling it to production of television series based on those copyrights, Paramount holds the exclusive license for production of Star Trek motion pictures.

Paramount and CBS are represented in the Axanar suit by the Los Angeles law firm, Loeb & Loeb, whose attorney, Jonathan Zavin, is leading the case against Axanar.

Paramount is a film studio, television production company and motion picture distributor, consistently ranked as one of the “Big Six” film studios of Hollywood. It is a subsidiary of U.S. media conglomerate Viacom. Paramount is the fifth-oldest surviving film studio in the world, and America’s oldest running studio, founded in 1912.

Paramount’s most important property, however, is Star Trek. Studio executives had begun to call it “the franchise” in the 1980s due to its reliable revenue, and other studios envied its “untouchable and unduplicatable” success. By 1998, Star Trek TV shows, movies, books, videotapes, and licensing provided so much of the studio’s profit that “it is not possible to spend any reasonable amount of time at Paramount and not be aware of [its] presence”; filming for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine required up to nine of the largest of the studio’s 36 sound stages.

In 1995, Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries’ United Television launched United Paramount Network (UPN) with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship series, fulfilling Barry Diller’s plan for a Paramount network from 25 years earlier. In 1999, Viacom bought out United Television’s interests, and handed responsibility for the start-up network to the newly acquired CBS unit, which Viacom bought in 1999, an ironic confluence of events as Paramount had once invested in CBS, and Viacom had once been the syndication arm of CBS as well.

Reflecting in part the troubles of the broadcasting business, in 2005 Viacom announced that it would split itself in two, which was completed in January 2006. The Viacom Inc. board split the company into CBS Corporation and a separate company under the Viacom name. Under the plan, CBS Corp. would comprise the CBS and UPN television networks, Paramount Television, Showtime, publisher Simon and Schuster, and CBS News, among other subsidiaries. The revamped Viacom would include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, BET and several other cable networks as well as Paramount Pictures.

In 2009, CBS stopped using the Paramount name in its series and changed the name of the production arm to CBS Television Studios, eliminating the Paramount name from television, to distance itself from the latter.

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