That’s another reason I’d like to see intellectual property laws loosened up: if someone in Bollywood decides to do a remake of Trek Classic with big musical numbers, they might owe some small royalty to the original franchise, but they shouldn’t have to worry about the laws getting in the way of doing something original and cool.

(Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis is a good example of someone carefully filing the serial numbers off a proprietary universe to write an excellent homage— in this case, to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books.)