Irony: Eugene Roddenberry Might Sue You For Using A Replicator To Create Your Own Star Trek Prop

from the replicate-this dept

An anonymous reader alerts us to some odd, and excessive, legal language coming from Eugene Roddenberry, son of the late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Apparently, the younger Roddenberry now runs Roddenberry.com, which sells all sorts of Star Trek replica props and prop kits. Our anonymous reader notes that he was looking through the various prop kits and downloaded the pdf manual for the Boomerang Hand Phaser Prop Kit and noticed the following text at the end:

"The physical reproduction by any means known or yet to be invented (including recasting and/or reverse engineering or 3D scanning/printing) of the Roddenberry.com Boomerang Phaser Kit or any of it's parts is expressly prohibited under U.S. and International copyright and product protection laws."

While I believe Rodenberry is overstating the law here, and he'd actually have a pretty difficult time suing in a lot of cases, what's even more amusing is the fact that Star Trek, of course, is the show that introduced the concept of "the replicator," a device that is now only weakly approximated by the same sort of 3D printing the younger Roddenberry now seeks to block. It's too bad he doesn't appear to sell a prop replicator, because it would be even more amusing to see the warning text on that manual...

Filed Under: 3d printing, eugene rodenberry, intellectual property, star trek