Fan film on the final frontier: Axanar Productions and the limits of fair use in the digital age

In an analysis of the copyright case Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions Inc. and Alec Peters (2016), which centers on a high-budget Star Trek fan film, I consider how the case frames digital-age media fandom's challenges to the law, and concomitantly, how the case frames the law's challenges to media fandom. Even while legal action of this kind does not dampen participatory culture on the whole, it raises questions about the legal definition of a fan and the limits of fair use doctrine, and it delineates the changing relationships between media industries and fans. Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions reveals the tension between the gift-giving ethos of fandom and online crowdfunding as a type of gift; it also reveals the negative industrial and legal reactions to fan filmmaking and crowdfunding as threats to the way film has traditionally been constituted. I analyze Axanar's use of Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, the introduction of Paramount/CBS's restrictive fan film guidelines, and finally, the rejected fair use argument proposed by the defense. I take up the rejected fair use argument by situating it alongside the case history of appropriation art in order to consider another way to argue for fan films as transformative works.

A Case Role of Verbs in the Movie Script Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secret

This writing entitled “A Case Role of Verbs in the Movie Script Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secret” was conducted in order to be able to identify the types of verb, to find out the semantic structure and the case role between the verb and its cases.The data in this study were taken directly from clauses and sentences found in the movie script. Those data were collected using the documentation method and note taking technique. In analyzing the data, Case Grammar theory proposed by Walter Cook (1979) was applied by qualitative method. In addition, in order to present the data analysis clearly and neatly, informal method was used to describe and explain the data.The result shows that there were three types of verbs found in the movie script. Those verbs are state, process, and action verbs. In addition, the semantic structure of the data is shown by using case frames. The case frames of the data are basic state, basic process, basic action, state experiential, process experiential, action experiential, state benefactive, process benefactive, action benefactive, state locative, process locative, and action locative verb. Besides, the case role of the datain surface structure is as agent, experiencer, benefactive, object, and locative. Furthermore, the analysis of deep structure showed that there are three covert case roles found in the data namely lexicalized, coreferential, and build-in.

From the past into the present: From case frames to semantic frames

This paper first shows how Frame Semantics grew out of earlier work on Case Grammar. Then, it discusses some of the basic principles of Frame Semantics and shows how these have been implemented in FrameNet, an online corpus-based lexicographic database (http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu). Using semantic frames to structure the lexicon of English, FrameNet provides a wealth of information showing how frame elements (situation-specific semantic roles) are realized syntactically (valence patterns). Finally, the paper provides an overview of how frame-semantic principles have been applied to cover non-lexical phenomena using compatible annotation and data formats. This so-called “constructicon” offers entries of grammatical constructions that are also based on corpus data and that are parallel to lexical entries in FrameNet.