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.
The author then filed suit against both Amazon and the Tolkien estate, claiming the streaming series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” had borrowed from his sequel and infringed his copyright.
I honestly wouldn't even be surprised. What was it, that thing with Star Trek Discovery taking plot points from some adventure game with space-faring tardigrades?
Going after the copyright holder for infringing on your work, which by merely existing commercially infringes on their copyright, is one hell of a way to get sued out the arse...
Having said that, it is a crime that LOTR still hasn't entered the public domain yet.
First two books in the series were "Fellowship of the King" and "The Two Trees" so...I'm not entirely convinced they were even very original stories...
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 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.
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