Film Rights to First & Second Age

[William Cloud Hicklin]

It's not a "very real problem". It's a completely artificial problem created from whole cloth.

There is a huge legal difference between a copyright and a legally registered copyright which attaches protections of law and introduces certain legal remedies and penalties. Huge difference.

No. There isn't. None. The only difference registration makes is that it's much easier to prove that the work in question existed as of that date. Period. The legal remedies and penalties exist notwithstanding as soon as the creative work reaches 'any tangible form.'

This I think is what underlies your argument. You're trying to claim that The Silmarillion somehow came into being post-68 and therefore somehow illegitimately compromised what UA had bought.

The film-rights holders have precisely the same rights they had in 1968. You're trying to argue that the publication of an Official Version might invite invidious comparisons to a made-for-Hollywood Crap Version. Well, it might. Tough.

You thought you owned something but now find out that it has been materially changed and altered makign it difficult for you to exercise the rights you paid for and were granted.

Once again: in selling film rights to LR, Tolkien *in no way whatsoever* compromised his rights to write whatever he bloody well pleased. He could had he chosen to do so have rewritten the end of the Third Age so as to make Sauron a hero fighting Gandalf's evil plot to corner the illicit pipe-weed trade. And UA/Zaentz/New Line would have no- repeat, NO- say in it.

Again- your argument boils down to a claim that since Zaentz has a claim on the Appendix synopsis, he effectively has a right to protect whatever value that claim might have from 'diminishment' by the original author writing futher about his own fictional world! Nonsense.

To adress your three lose-lose-lose propositions- they were *always* lose-lose-lose. Option one is the empty right to invent a bogus non-Tolkien plot, which readers would assail. Quite true. It doesn't become any more bogus than it already was when the Author's canonical account appears.