I dunno, if I build a house, I can leave it to my family for generations. Indeed, barring something interfering with that ownership, it will be passed along. Maybe they’ll sell it, or take out a loan against it and default, or a disaster could strike, or whatever.
Why would any other creation be less portable to my heirs?
Mind you, I’m definitely of the belief that artistic creations like books should eventually go public domain. I’m fine with any number of possible restrictions on that duration. But it is strange that one of the only things that automatically gets removed from a family are things like writing. Ideas, if you want to break it down. We treat them different than other things we create.
Again, I’m fine with there’s being limits on holding ideas restricted. That’s necessary to prevent loss of such things, that are harder to preserve than something like a piece of jewelry, or a statue, or a house. That’s why patents and copyrights need to expire, but I can’t agree that the limits as they exist are fucked up/bad/wrong.
Seriously, I’m a published author, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about such things.
Now, I would love to see the laws change so that any copyright held by a publicly traded company, or that has been sold/abandoned by the actual heirs of the author is shorter than when held by the heirs of the author.
And, any popular work is going to have the issue of who gets to decide what is and isn’t done to the works before or after public domain. You can end up with something wonderful being shat on by asshats. So it isn’t like copyrights expiring is without drawbacks. When what’s at stake is only keeping the works published and available, that’s a clear cut thing that benefits everyone.
But adaptations, expansions, “fanfic”? I would definitely prefer someone that at least has some chance of the author’s intent being known than some shitty company looking to milk the work for every possible dime.
Why shouldn’t authors be able to build generational wealth the way a business can? You’re talking about people profiting off a dead man, but that’s what investments and properties and such are. It’s future generations profiting off a dead person’s work. There’s billionaires out there that are sitting on wealth that was amassed not just decades ago, but sometimes centuries. Why do authors not have that possibility?
I understand that at a personal level you would want to share wealth with your children and their children, but that is not what copyright is about. The intention is that the creator gets to make their earnings out of their original product for a limited time only. So that they can continue to make original products and make a living. It is not intended to provide for your family for generations. While this may be what it has become with the help of corporations, in my opinion this is not it’s intended use.
Aside from that I think your works should become public domain after a limited time, prefferedly during your lifetime. So that as much as possible people get to enjoy your original works of art.
You make a good point about generational wealth in business and I think there should be limits to that as well. It doesn’t help the world at all if wealth just stagnates like that and in my opinion it should be shared with those doing the actual work, instead of a select few who were born in it, were extremely lucky, or gained money in immoral ways.
I’ll leave it at that since I am not the right person to go into a discussion with you about all of these things. I do want to thank you for your work and for gifting us with your books entertaining us and giving us an escape of daily problems, expanding our knowledge with educational content or whatever else. Know that you are valued and there are people out there being touched by your work.
Remember, the only reason we can still watch the highly influential 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu today is because some people didn’t destroy all their copies despite a court saying they had to.
Even with several details altered, Stoker’s heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. However, several prints of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema and the horror genre.
The author in question here was pretty shitty. He wrote his own sequel to called “Fellowship of the King”, and then sued Amazon and the Tolkien estate saying they stole elements from his book. He lost, and the Tolkien estate countersued.
The guy played stupid games and won stupid prizes.
Some older dutch movies were released as rentals to the theaters that had to be returned after they stopped playing the movie. These copies were all destroyed and re-releases on DVD now look worse than what it looked like in movie theatres.
The good news is that some theatres hung on to some movies.
I don’t know how many might be still be around, but I know for a couple of movies where they are. I don’t think they have been properly archived and/or converted to digital media yet. I would like to see if there are people in The Netherlands that can do these things and if the current owners of the rolls of film are willing to.
I never understand this shit. Like even if you have absolutely no morals, you’re Vin Diesel. You can pretty much have consensual sex whenever you want to. Why do you have to resort to assaulting people?
This right here. Rape is not about arousal, it’s about power. I highly recommend Roy Hazelwood’s books on the matter if anyone, like me, has a morbid curiosity about why people commit certain violent crimes.
My uneducated guess would be that if you can have “normal” women at any time you want; or more generally have any needs met at any time because you are rich and famous, the things you cant have are much more appealing. A “no” or “not for sale” becomes “you don’t offer enough yet”.
I kinda stopped liking him when the whole beef with the Rock happened because boy did that make him look like an arrogant bitch
That’s also when I learned he made directors shoot scenes with them together in such a way that made them look the same height which is just…how self conscious can you be? You’re Vin Diesel. Nobody gives a shit that you’re “only” 5’11"
He also has a contract term limiting how badly fights can go for him. But apparently that’s common for action stars, so whatever.
I did find it amusing that during his feud with the Rock, they had to count the exact numbers of hits each took while fighting each other on screen so neither would look bad. It’s like, Vin is a D&D nerd who turned his horror franchise into a science fantasy opera and started his own video game company because he was frustrated at bad movie tie-ins (side note: Escape From Butcher Bay is one of, if not the, best prison games ever made). Embrace nerdity, reject this toxic masculinity crap. There’s a massive audience for that thing now - just look at Ryan Reynolds, nobody talks shit about him being a massive nerd.
Though this lawsuit is about events from thirteen years ago, so he was already too far gone early in his career. If it’s true, fuck him. Rapists and sexual assaulters get no sympathy.
I promise you that if the stuff I’ve written and published could be used by anyone, however they wanted, it would not have been published. I would have kept that shit to myself.
If anything, copyright laws encourage creativity because the person knows they can take their time to build things up. You don’t have to worry about fifteen sequels to your book being spammed by hacks trying to profit from your work
Everything else is a fanfiction. Even the Silmarillion. By far the most obnoxious reaction to the show is from “Tolkien purists” who got their entire Tolkien knowledge base from Peter Jackson.
The show is a perfectly Tolkienish story, despite the gratuitous lack of random singing, it’s just not a good one. Like, okay, you need to compress the timeline for the show, fair enough, just do a good job of that.
Wrong Durins to fight both the War of the Rings and the Balrog?
Then don’t tease the fucking Moria Balrog. If you want to use a Balrog, because Balrogs are fucking sweet, there was more than one…
Honestly, the weirdest part of the show is that they’ll follow a lore deep cut with something that could only possibly fool someone that missed the deep cut, but also doesn’t know or care who Gandalf or Isildur is, so what’s the payoff for the reveal?
Look, I agree his works shouldn’t be destroyed, just not monetizable.
But the dude poked a bear with a sharp stick… Suing the creators of the story/characters you’ve built your content on for copyright infringement? Brilliant move…
However; simply disagreeing with reality doesn’t change it.
But; go ahead and continue to personally attack strangers on the internet instead of actually working towards the change you want to see. I’m sure it’ll be effective.
Working toward change, but not making normative statements or highlighting problems in rationale. Obviously a real copyright reformist goes around tutting at those “semantics” while parroting the status quo.
You don’t think that for the copyright laws to change we also need to change how we view it? How could you be properly critical of the copyright law if you refuse to make the distinction necessary for a certain type of criticism?
I get the “that’s not how the world is” argument, but you can’t talk about how the world could/should be by using only the word that describe the current state of the world. If you want to be critical of the existing system you need to develop a vocabulary that allows for such criticism.
For instance if you don’t make the distinction between the creator and copyright holder you can’t make criticism such as “you shouldn’t be able to copyright works that you haven’t created”. You can’t tell the difference between copyright owned by the creator and copyright owned by copyright owner because those two people are indistinguishable, so the entire criticism becomes nonsense.
If the estate had gone after the author, this would be a very different conversation; but that’s not what happened. The author chose to involve Tolkiens estate, knowing the current climate around copyright.
I struggle to find sympathy for that.
Then you add on direct personal insults instead of constructive conversation and I completely check out. It’s not worth my energy to have a discussion with such people.
You’ve clearly already checked out considering I’m not even the person who insulted you. Here’s an idea, maybe don’t partake in conversations you’re not going to bother to even pay attention. I guarantee you’ll automatically come across as less of an asshole.
You can’t just extend copyright indefinitely. It’s not like a patent, where you can make minute changes and claim it’s a new product. The original works have a copyright limit of 95 years after the first date of publish (thanks Disney and other corporate lobbyists).
If we go by The Return of the King, it was published in 1955. That means the words, the story, the settings, and the characters will be public domain in 2050. Steamboat Willie, on the other hand, was published in 1928. That means it expires at the end of this year. Unless Disney can convince Congress to change copyright law again, these copyrights all have hard expiration dates.
ETA: Disney might have a case where they can claim copyright on the information they added or changed from the original works, just like how they can still claim copyright over Mickey after losing Steamboat Willie.
And I’m sure they will, because fuck society, amirite? /s
Works made for hire are 95 years from publication. LotR is not a work for hire, so it goes by life of the author plus 75 years. It goes public domain in 2044.
I think an argument could be made to set it to the date of death of the author. I agree with the other guy that it should only apply to commercial works though.
I also don’t think that the copyright should be transferable. The trading of ideas is an absurd concept to me. But then us humans do a lot of absurd things so I guess it’s just par for the course.
not exactly. You can of course still get existing works by pirating them.
But if the Tolkien works entered the public domain, anyone could use them for any creative purposes freely. And yes, a lot of the new material would be trash. But some excellent works would appear to.
A good example of this is Lovecraft’s works and the Cthulhu Mythos, that although not public domain until recent years, Lovecraft encouraged others to use his own creations on their own stories, thus expanding the literary universe of his own creation. Some stories are awful, but there has also been a ton of great works based on Lovecraft’s creations that couldn’t have existed otherwise.
Also Sherlock Holmes. Now, the BBC might have done a terrible job, but a lot of other people have written great stories because Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain
Another character in the public domain is Zeus, and the rest of his family. Liked Disney’s Hercules? Supergiant’s Hades? Netflix’s Blood of Zeus? Riordan’s Percy Jackson? Only possible because of public domain.
Well how else are we supposed to encourage people to be related to people who develop intellectual property? It makes sense from a neponomic standpoint.
Believe it or not, some people do work extra hard in order to ensure their descendants have an easy life. I’m not weighing in on whether that is wise or not but it is definitely a thing.
Yeah, and that’s why white people are richer than black people today, even though slavery ostensibly ended 200 years ago. It’s time that we outlaw this behaviour.
you’re gonna get downvoted but no amount of downvotes will change the fact that black people weren’t allowed to own things in america until most things were already owned by white people.
Honestly I don’t really care, I’m more inclined to strategy and 4x games.
If you don mind me recommending a game, check out against the storm, it’s a city builder with rogue like elements, and it came out recently out of early access, it’s reaaaaally addicting
The books go into public domain in 20 years. Now that Christopher Tolkien is out of the way (who tended to block a lot of stuff, for better or worse) , the current heirs want as much out of it as they can.
20 years might sound like a lot, but that’s about as much time as between the Peter Jackson movies and now.
Tbh they seem to be a lot more “hands off” with non-canon stuff, which I think includes all of the LOTR/middle earth licensed games, and that’s not a bad thing imo.
I think it’s okay to let this one go doesn’t seem like there is any value in his work.
I do think it’s time to open up the rights to older IPs and let the community make their own stories within universes though. I loved all the star wars EU stuff as a kid.
How can you decide that? Have you read his work? Why should only works with “value” matter?
The idea of someone destroying their own work to satisfy a copyright holder is abhorrent. Worse the copyright holders who counter sued contributed absolutely nothing to the original work they hold the copyright over - they’re just inheritors and businesses.
It just shows what a mess the copyright laws are. The writer shouldn’t have sued but he’d probably have been sued anyway because the copyright laws are a tool for right holders to exert control over other people, and go way beyond what is needed due to the influences of corporate greed and lobbying over decades.
I read his summary it was filled with sentences like “Thus begins the War of the Rings to End All Wars of the Rings.” It reeks of shitty fan fiction that should have lived out it’s life in a lost corner of the internet with all the other shitty fan fiction out there. It could easily have stayed there until humanity wipes itself out and the last servers lose power. This troll had to go a poke the bear and sue the rights holders for plagiarizing him in a prequel show loosely based off of existing Tolkien works when his novels are sequels.
As for what has value and why only things that have value matter. I think value is provided if a work of art or piece of media make you feel something, think about something new, or maybe just let you escape for a bit. What does that is going to vary based on the individual. I’m pretty sure this book only provided value to the author.
Copyright’s explicit purpose is to encourage new works.
Any form of “unpublishing” is theft from the public. You wanna say a guy can’t make money on a thing? Great, fine, go nuts. But nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.
Yes, copyright exists to encourage new works - which the author ignored by creating content violating copyright law. Never mind the public, this dude stole from the copyright holders. He’s a pirate and he got caught.
It’s mind boggling how anyone could possibly consider otherwise. Aside from your own life, there’s nothing more belonging to oneself than their thoughts.
Once you share your thought, they are no longer yours alone, and the thoughts they spark in others are, in some ways, both yours and theirs. Or, if you prefer to hear it another way, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This entire sub is delusional. You believe in things which are untrue. You make things up to justify theft. It’s funny and it’s sad. I really don’t know where you get these irrational theories or how you’d ever justify them in a court.
If you want to live in literal communism, sure, you can establish that any idea anyone expresses belongs to the world. In the world we actually live in, we have laws protecting people’s intellectual property in order for them to generate content and profit from those original ideas. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an idea at all if anyone can make money from it. This further promotes new original ideas that aren’t derivative of existing ones. This is exactly what the OP stated and I agreed with.
Every now and then I see threads like this on lemmy where people are getting downvoted into negatives despite being objectively correct about something (and the wrong info being upvoted). I think there may be a lot of very young, inexperienced, naive, and gullible children here. At least I hope they’re children.
No there is new work that has been done that you are reducing to “piracy”. As if intellectual and creative processes ever could take place in a vacuum. The only contradiction is that copyright laws as a concept do nothing than stifle innovation and progress. If you do not like how anyone can profit from other people’s ideas you should maybe rethink your stance on monetisation schemes in general instead.
True. To throw my opinion into the mix, if the Rings of Power show did actually copy from his work, they should look to partner with Demetrious instead of all this nonsense. I agree he legally can’t profit off the IP of the Tolkien estate as laws stand, but copywrite also lasts far longer than it has any good reason to. It should be the author’s lifetime plus a decade or so. Finally, it is an affront to creativity everywhere to order the destruction of all physical and electronic copies. That should not happen. Ever.
I’m not getting into how long a copyright should last. I don’t have a meaningful opinion on it.
What it seems people are overlooking (or forgiving?) is that the guy published a book about characters (IP) he doesn’t own. Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is theft.
Whether or not Amazon should option his material is irrelevant if he didn’t get permission to use it in the first place. I mean, fan fiction is one thing. Creative license and educational purposes could be argued. But he published a freaking book!
Do you think Zack Snyder should get to put out a Rebel Moon and call it “Rebel Moon: A Star Wars Story” without getting permission or paying for licensing? Is this the reality this sub believes we live in? If you write a novel and I read it and soon start writing better more successful stories based explicitly on your characters without crediting you or sharing in my profit, how would you feel? Should your work be public domain? Is that what you (collective) feel is best for “the public”?
I don’t really have an opinion on what should happen with the work either. I could see some cases where it would be a major loss for the public to have the work erased. This could be catastrophic for classic literature. For something so new and not having any established cultural significance (as much as you wish it did), I’d go with whatever a judge believes is best under the law. You’re welcome to argue the validity of the law, and I may agree with you, but that’s a different conversation.
Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is theft.
This is the point I wanted to contend and is the main premise I disagree with. In my opinion, nothing was taken, at most borrowed, by the author of the book.
But he published a freaking book!
Yes, is it not great?
Do you think Zack Snyder should get to put out a Rebel Moon and call it “Rebel Moon: A Star Wars Story” without getting permission or paying for licensing?
In my dreams, yes.
Is this the reality this sub believes we live in? If you write a novel and I read it and soon start writing better more successful stories based explicitly on your characters without crediting you or sharing in my profit, how would you feel?
I would be fucking thrilled to be honest. If someone not only cited my research, but actually improved on it I would schedule a meeting to talk with them ASAP.
Should your work be public domain? Is that what you (collective) feel is best for “the public”?
YES. Everything that is published should be publicly available as default. I understand that this would require another method for financing those that actually make new stuff, but that is something that is sorely needed anyway. What usually happens is that the actual creators are left with pennies while legal entities own IP almost indefinitely.
Also, I want to add that had IP laws always been what they are today, much great work from the past (that is now enjoying protection by copyright) could not have existed. I also ask how say the dwarves in Tolkien’s tales could be copyrighted when they are based on stories about dwarves from Norse mythology?
TL;DR there was a special time when all work got copyrighted into oblivion. It has to end so that humanity can create more cool new stuff just as we did back then.
I mean it deserves to be lost forever in that it has no artistic or ideological merit. Mein Kampf deserves to be lost. But we deserve to keep it as a warning so that we do not repeat history. But if humanity could grow to the point that such warnings are never needed again, and if the book could be forgotten due to losing all present and future relevance, that would be a good thing. What a thing deserves is sometimes different to what is necessary or good.
I don’t even like Tolkien (find his writing to be just excessive, I don’t need to know the color of the buttons on the shirt of the dead character with no name), and even I have to agree, lol.
Too many re-interpretations of authors’ works. Tolkien is highly detailed - not reflecting that (or worse, substituting your own details) in a movie or show is just hubris. If you’re so damn good why don’t you write your own shit. Oh, your name doesn’t sell instantly is why.
We've seen this with the Witcher, we've seen it with GoT, we've seen it with LOTR: super artistic production teams which have their heads so deep up their own arses and are entrenched so deeply inside that weird removed-from-reality Hollywood bubble that they legitimately think they know better how to interpret the lore some world renowned author made than the author himself. Always ends in mediocre showsand hilarious interviews with said production teams where
Oh God The Witcher. The production team was handed an incredibly strong female lead character who was smarter, more politically astute, and more feared/respected than almost any other character in the series. And they immediately tore her down and made her a petty whining brat while claiming it was about female empowerment. A pox on Netflix and the entire production team.
Didn’t the show runner say that the dumb public was to blame for the failure of the show?
Edit: he blamed dumb Americans.
Baginski said, “When a series is made for a huge mass of viewers, with different experiences, from different parts of the world, and a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary.”
He has a point about simplifications when it comes to media and art being approachable by the masses (and I say this with no insult intended, simplification of anything will always have broader appeal). See popular music vs avante-guard jazz (i.e. Miles Davis, probably the most-approachable of the type!)
But holy cow what a condescending, arrogant, insulting pick.
Thing is: They are working from the basis of media that has been successful already. So the amount of "dumbing down" neccessary to achieve a somewhat broad appeal has already been done by the author of the original, so to speak. Their argument doesn't hold any water whatsoever on no level imaginable.
There is some stuff I don’t dislike about Netflix’s Witcher, but god damn, I feel like they actively set out to do the worst rewriting ever with how they treated/portrayed basically the entire Lodge of Sorceresses
My hopes were so high for the stupid thing. They couldn’t tell the story in front of them that was already loaded with allegirical social justice issues. They had to reinterpret the entire thing and just plain fucked it up. Just sad.
Game of Thrones is an odd one, because what they did was fuck up the characters. All of them. I don’t think a single character who survived to the end was left unscathed by shitty writing outside of a couple minor characters. It doesn’t really help that they obviously rushed the ending out, which only made it worse by making the actions of the characters make absolutely no sense.
My problem is that Galadriel was treated like an impatient, naive child by other characters when in Tolkien’s Lore she is already well-respected and older than most others.
Why? Because female? Bullshit, she was already strong and established by the time the events in Amazon’s LotR take place. They dumbed her down and made her look like an impulsive idiot incapable of seeing evil when that’s literally her whole character.
The showrunners did not give Galadriel the respect she deserved.
I wouldn’t say naive, but definitely reckless. And I would 100% say they portrayed her as strong in the tv series. Hell, it begins with her on an incursion on the remains of angband, which if you know the lore I’d say it’s pretty badass. Her arc in season 1 was about how she was so blinded by revenge and recklessness, that she couldn’t see the evil in front of her. Which is pretty fitting for a noldor elf. It shows that even trying your hardest to make good, your actions can and will have unintended consequences, even ‘evil’ ones. Which perfectly sets up her eventual rejection of the one ring, during the mirror scene in fellowship of the ring. She knew then she’d have good intentions using it, but she also knew more evil will come with that
Galadriel shouldn’t be blinded by revenge and recklessness, because Feanor murdered thousands of his own kin over his stolen Silmarils and Galadriel knew he would do something horrible for his own selfish reasons.
If she can see evil inside another person’s soul, surely she can see the consequences of her own actions 5 minutes before she takes said actions? Like jumping out of a boat hundreds of miles from any land mass? Or maybe she would know how and why the Queen of Numenor felt about helping her, prior to getting upset and yelling?
Nothing about her character in the Rings of Power has any respect for Tolkien’s work, because they dumbed her down and made her act incredibly stupid on multiple occasions, completely ignoring the power and wisdom she already possesses.
I don’t mean to start a discussion here, but this is your interpretation and it’s valid. But galadriel’s character has contradictory history depending on your sources (even regarding the kinslaying). And it’s debated even between Tolkien’s scholars the extend at which she can ‘sense evil’. After all, she herself was deceived by saruman after his corruption during the third age.
In your last paragraph you say ‘nothing about her character in the series has any respect for Tolkien’s work’. That’s simply hyperbole, and arguably not true, as even a surface level reading can prove otherwise. Such words are not Tolkien’s way.
Anyway, I don’t want you to change your mind, just want you to be aware of the possibility of other interpretations. Take care!
The story lines they fabricated were (mostly) formulaic, the effects were (mostly) poor, and the characters were (mostly) unlikable. Apart from that I liked it! :P
It had a few moments that I enjoyed but overall it fell flat because the characters where flat.
To me, it just seemed … dull. Like, the conversations characters were having weren’t interesting. What was happening on screen wasn’t interesting. I felt myself suddenly snapping back to reality several times each episode after my mind aimlessly drifted away from what I was watching. And I’m someone who doesn’t need Michael Bay explosions and constant action to enjoy a tv show. Really hope they turn it around and do something interesting with it. Absolute snooze fest.
Yeah. It had a few moments of character interaction that I liked but it mostly felt forced and dull. Sad really as it could have been much more than flashy.
Should copyright for works that old be expired? Yes!
In the actual world we live in, was this guy ever going to avoid being sued so hard that his grandchildren will be embarrassed for him? No!
You've got to admire the lemming-like devotion to the legal cliff he threw himself off though. Writing a sequel to not only a copyright work, but one that is still in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to a 20-year old wildly successful series of films? Ballsy. Subsequently suing one of the largest companies in the world and the estate that produced the original works as infringing his copyright?
Honestly, I’m surprised he wasn’t embarrassed to claim that any part of that tedious shitheap of storytelling that Amazon produced had been lifted from his work.
The few episodes of that ridiculous black-hole of entertainment are the only things I have ever watched where I truly wanted those hours of my life back.
You felt much more strongly about it than me then. I just found myself not caring about it in the slightest; the only thing I really felt was boredom. Which is arguably the worst possible outcome for any work of art.
I mean, Game of Thrones season 8 made me feel that I’m never watching any content related to it ever again. Not sure they really wanted that kind of hate.
“The Fellowship of the King” title is a combination of the titles of the first book in the LOTR trilogy “The Fellowship of the Ring” and the third book “The Return of the King”.
“The Two Trees” title is similar to the second book in the LOTR trilogy “The Two Towers”
Yeah, this guy didn’t have a leg to stand on. There’s an independently owned cafe opposite sarhole mill (inspiration for “the shire”) on the street JRR Tolkien grew up on called “the hungry hobbit”. It’s been called that since 2005 - before the release of the hobbit film. A production company sued this tiny sandwich shop, sitting on a roundabout 3 miles south of Birmingham for the unauthorised use of the word “hobbit”. That was completely egregious imo. It’s now called “the hungry hobb” - they just took down the last two letters on the sign. I really should grab a sandwich from them one day.
There are 309 million possible ways to combine 6 letters. I would wager only a few million are even remotely pronounceable. The notion that someone can claim a bunch of those words and prevent other people from using them, even in unrelated areas, is completely absurd. There are over 8 billion people on this planet, words get reused. They should just fucking deal with it.
A word isn’t a thought. Thoughts are unique, but a word can be arrived at independently in several different ways by the sea spelled with a C, you see.
I get your point but in this case it’s not JRR Tolkiens estate who’s claiming copyright infringement, it’s a random production company in Sweden or something. A production company in an entirely different country with no real ties to JRRT has decided an independent cafe built on the same street as Tolkien grew up on, opposite the mill he used as inspiration, is harming their asset somehow by calling themselves the hungry hobbit.
Unfortunately, you can sue anyone for any bogus reason you want. And if you have more money than whoever you’re suing, it doesn’t matter how frivolous it is, because you can just bankrupt them by forcing them to pay lawyer fees.
That’s precisely what happened here. The place had been called the hungry hobbit for years under multiple owners. The current owner bought it, updated some official paperwork and within the first 6 months of her ownership got hit with the “unauthorised usage” bs. She couldn’t afford to fight it. Thankfully the “hungry hobb” is still doing enough business to stay open 12 years later.
When it happened I thought the typeface was the issue rather than the word hobbit. But no.Here’s before and this is after. I can’t get my head around the fact that the production company sued this tiny sandwich shop. It’s so ridiculous!
Really where was it used?
Found it but no it was not. One line in one book from 1895 “The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles … hobbits, hobgoblins."
So still think it’s very unlikely it was a word that anyone knew before the Hobbit.
Ballsy? He’s an outright copyright troll and anyone celebrating him here in the comments should read the article…
He wrote a knockoff book and then tried to claim Tolkien’s characters as his own and sue his estate? Does nobody remember the days of BS software patent trolls trying to claim they invented “the app” or “method for clicking on things with the mouse cursor?” Do we remember how mad we were at those shysters?
I read through the article but it doesn’t seem to specify the nature of the book. How do we know it’s a “knock off”? It might very well be fanfiction. Copyright law aside, fanfiction can be original and is a valid artistic expression.
This is quite a nuanced issue. The author is claiming that the Rings of Power copied his ideas. Even if the author didn’t have the legal right to publish this book, he might have put original ideas into his work, and the Tolkien Estate should not automatically own these. The copyright owner “should” (within the current legal framework) be able to make you take down your derivative work, but they don’t own it. The article doesn’t specify why the original lawsuit was dismissed.
variety.com
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