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All this because the film rights were sold at a time when no book length SIL had been published or legally copyrighted. There was no competing book length SIL in existence that had been legally copyrighted when the film rights were sold. All that came years afterwards.
It puts the current rights holders in a position of damned if they do and damned if they do not. If they make a film and ignore the actual book length SIL and fill in all the blanks on their own from the Appendicies, they risk ridicule, derision and potential damage to their ability to market and do business with their product because "its not the real thing. You made most of this up and we can prove it by comparing the real book length SIL to your movie".
That situation did not exist when the film rights were sold in 1969. Now it does.
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Again, Sauron, the copyright in the broader 'Silmarillion' came into existence as that work was written, not in 1977. Its eventual date of publication makes *no difference whatsoever.*
To follow on from mine hereinabove, 'derivative right' is the right to adapt or transform a creative work from one medium to another. In this case from book to film. Now, the Copyright Act makes a very important point (one of those which courts get very exercised over):
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The copyright in a compilation or derivative work.....does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.
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*No* exclusive right in the pre-existing material. Derivative rights are *fixed*. they do not, ever, expand; in this case, the derivative rights to make movies about Feanor or for that matter Aragorn do not increase if Tolkien-and-heirs make use of those characters in another book.
You complain that the Silmarillion being published somehow decreased the commercial value of Zaentz' rights. Well, in the first place, copyright law only concerns itself with questions of ownership (intellectual *property*, right?) The market is the market. Zaentz today owns precisely what UA did in 1968. No more, no less. The value of that property is irrelevant.
Let's look at it this way: suppose you buy 100 shares of Acme Corp (purveyors of fine malfunctioning explosives since 1949). Subsequently, Acme makes another issue of common stock, which dilutes the market and drives the price of your shares down. Do you have a claim? Not a prayer. You still own 100 shares of Acme, which is exactly what you bought.
The situation poor little multizillionaire Zaentz finds himself in (besides being far richer than the whole Tolkien family put together) is no different at all from any producer who buys derivative film rights to a novel, including the characters therein, and subsequently the author publishes a sequel. Sure, that diminishes the inchoate value of whatever bogus movie sequel might have been planned. Tough.
Or to take a real-world example, where the film-book relationship is reversed: George Lucas' decision to produce the second set of Star Wars films contradicted and thus lessened the 'value' of parts of Timothy Zahn's (and others') Star Wars novels. Do you think Zahn has a claim?
One final shot: It's also worth pointing out that the 'value' of Zaentz' film rights in a one-paragraph synopsis of the Silmarillion was very close to nil, until Christopher Tolkien made The Silmarillion a number-one bestseller.