My,my. Things sure are getting heated up here!
I'll just contribute my two cents: Saul Zaentz only licensed the Hobbit and the LOTR including Appendices, and those are the only rights he owned. He never owned the rights to any of Tolkien's unpublished notes(which, at that time, were unknown to most of the world) and Christopher Tolkien did not 'degrade' Zaentz's license in any way because he never owned the rights to any of the material in the Silmarillion (except whatever little appears in the Appendices: words like 'Silmarillion', 'Tuor', 'Thingol' etc.).