Even federal appeals court judges are ‘Star Trek’ fans
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A video game developer who had circulated a science fiction video game that featured a tardigrade, a real-life microscopic organism with the unique ability to survive space, cannot pursue his “Star Trek”-related copyright litigation, said a federal appeals court Monday, in an opinion that affirms a lower court ruling and reflects an in-depth knowledge of the show’s various incarnations.
Apparently, resistance was futile in terms of the author of the unanimous opinion by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York’s three-judge panel being able to resist citing Star Trek’s iconic introduction: “Today in the latest round of Star Trek-litigation we are asked to boldly go where no court has gone before and determine whether the television series (a recent addition to the Star Trek franchise) unlawfully infringed upon a game developer’s video game concept involving a tardigrade,” said the ruling in Anas Osama Ibrahim Abdin v. CBS Broadcasting Inc. Netflix, Inc., CBS Corp., CBS Interactive Inc.
Mr. Abdin’s litigation said he had submitted a version of his science fiction videogame to several online forums and websites in 2013, and two years later, the defendants premiered their latest installment in the “Star Trek” series, “Star Trek Discovery,” which featured a tardigrade named “Ripper,” according to the opinion.
Tardigrades, which are microscopic eight-legged animals that are less than one millimeter in length, have previously been the subject of fictional works, and Mr. Abdin has “failed to plausibly allege substantial similarity between protectable elements of his videogame and elements from Discovery,” said the ruling, in affirming the lower court’s ruling dismissing the case.
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