Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
m'kay.... well I'm not a lawyer, but..... if the changes Tolkien made to the 1st ed text created a 'substantially different work' (even though from a reader's pov they aren't really all that great), & enabled him to register the new edition as copyright how come the changes that were made after his death by Hammond & Scull, under CRRT's authorisation, don't make it a 'substantially different work' ? .
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The thing is that the 2nd ed of LOTR wasn't done to extend copyright but to
confirm copyright in the USA. It turned later out that this wasn't really necessary, but it was an easy option for the publishers.
Sure, the 2nd ed has a new copyright date - 1965 instead of 1954, but that doesn't matter.
All of the amendments made since then, for example in the 50th Anniversary ed, only amount to corrections to the text. Proof reading adjustments, really. It's not like Christopher has added a chapter or anything of that sort.
Alternately, if Christopher Tolkien
was to add some other material to the book - for example, adding the epilogue - you would probably end up with just that part of the book having a different copyright to the rest of the book. Making such alterations could also play havoc with future film or television adaptations - what version of the book would you own the rights to?
Let's go further with this - if Christopher T. made sufficient alterations to assert a entirely new copyright then you'd really have a different book. Call it LOTR v2.0. The original ed would be LOTR v1.0, the 2nd ed would be LOTR v1.1, the 50th anniv ed would be approx. LOTR v1.14. The v1 editions could become public domain while v2.0 remains copyrighted.
With The Silmarillion we have a different situation. Although it is composed of text written mainly during Tolkien's life it was never published until it was assembled after his death by CT and therefore he shares the copyright with JRRT. Therefore the copyright is maintained until x number of years after his death, not JRRT's.
What will be interesting is, at the time that the Hobbit and the LOTR go out of copyright, whether it would be possible to legally issue a fan-edited version of The Silmarillion that only used Tolkien's original drafts - on the basis that they should be public domain as no work by Christopher Tolkien would be involved.