Tolkien Estate blocks new Tolkien book

[davem]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

More to the point is whether the suppression of scandalous, or at least embarrassing, facts is "what is being done here".

Ok - 'personal' stuff - for which I base my arguments on the publisher's statement:

Despite many revisions and changes made at the insistence of The Tolkien Estate it appears that The Tolkien Estate will seek to take court action to prevent the release of this book regardless. Everyone involved in the publication has worked hard to meet the requests of The Tolkien Estate time and time again, however it would be misleading to release a Biography on Hilary Tolkien without proper reference to his close relationship with his brother.

So, unless the material in question is an exchange of letters between the brothers each arguing that the other one has the cooler looking mustache, we're talking about 'personal' information which the Estate does not want in the public domain, & if that material in question was completely bland then the Estate would not care if it was out there, & the writers/publishers would not feel that the book could not be published without it.

I could (were I that way inclined) argue that I seem to be the only party even attempting to ask what the nature of this material is - no-one else seems even vaguely interested. And that is something that has puzzled me all through this thread - why is no-one else even curious about what it could be that the Estate feels is so unnacceptable that it will threaten to take a tiny publisher to court to prevent the publication of 20 pages of a book that would probably have a print run of no more than a few thousand copies & why would said tiny publisher & authors feel that the excision of 20 pages out of 300 would effectively so ruin the book that they would withdraw it altogether rather than simply cut that bit?

The responses to my posts seem to be sum-upable as 'stop suggesting all this 'dodgy' stuff about the family - they have a right to their privacy', but no-one is even attempting to get at what the issue might be. There are letters which the Estate will not allow to be quoted - or paraphased - & they are requesting 20 pages of the book concerning this material be removed. And no-one seems the slightest bit curious about the whole thing. No-one seems any more bothered about it than to state 'well, they are being a bit obstructive'. And again, no-one seems to have any issue with the way Copyright is being used to stifle creativity & the dissemination of information- Tech dirt has a nice piece about the subject today http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...opyright.shtml

Copyright is being used to prevent a work of scholarship being published, because the owners of the copyrighted material do not want it in the public domain. Why not - Do they (a) intend to publish said material themselves? Fine - when? Do they (b) feel that it should not be made public at all? Fine - why?

My argument all along has been that (as far as I'm concerned) preventing the publication of a work of scholarship is a serious matter (& I'm fairly certain Tolkien himself would agree with that statement - even though he might not approve of the publication of this particular work - who knows (certainly not us now....)) & requires more than the vague statement 'Its our stuff, so nerrrr!'

I'm actually very angry about this behaviour on the part of the Estate - anyone who prevents books being published better have a very good reason - & I don't think the Estate has provided one.