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My point is that it is not clear what rights are owned by the Tolkien Estate and what rights are owned by Zaentz and New LIne when it comes to material outsideofthe actual HOBBIT and LOTR stories.
Why? Because JRRT included a wealth of historical information in his Appendicies which were part of LOTR - ROTK and sold as film rights in 1969. Eight years later, the book length SILMARALLION is published and now there are two accounts of these events.
Many people here, including Mr. Hicklin, speak as if they have a Supreme Court decision in front of them clearly spelling out in great detail what can be done and what cannot be done with these film rights. This is not the case in reality. There is much grey area .
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There is NO grey area. There are no overlapping rights. There is no ambiguity, except in your fevered imagination. NONE.
It's amazingly simple. Zaentz/New Line can use material found between the covers of the Lord of the Rings. Period. That's it. The existence of other Middle-earth material changes nothing- they have no rights to it. PJ is constrained to doing what he did with, say, the (EE) Gladden Fields- stick to the very brief LR account without any reference at all to the detailed UT narrative of the same event.
Christ, this is (for a lawyer) as maddening as it is for a paleontologist confronting some no-evidence-for-evolution Fundamentalist.