By now, I will
guess that most of our audience has heard about the lawsuit that the Tolkien
estate filed
against Warner Brothers for its marketing of Lord of the
Rings products. If you haven’t heard, The Hollywood Reporter has a pretty good summary of the case
as well as a link to the court filing. I think fans of J.R.R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings owe it to themselves to take a
look. Don’t be intimidated; the salient bits of the filing itself are short and
written in almost plain English.
The Tolkien estate is asking courts to define the contractual
limits on Warner Brothers marketing rights to The Lord of the
Rings and The Hobbit, stating that the original marketing
rights only included “tangible property.” They charge that Warner Brothers has
gone well beyond those rights. I have no idea what exactly tangible property
means in legal terms, but it is hard for me to see how United Artists, the
original purchaser of the film rights, could have believed they were buying
rights to create Lord of the Rings-themed hotels, restaurants,
amusement parks, and online slot machines. (The slot machines exist. The hotels,
restaurants, and amusement parks have been patented by Warner Brothers.) The
lawsuit argues that Warner Brothers is trying to convert what was a limited
right to profit from J.R.R. Tolkien’s intellectual property into an unlimited
right to use The Lord of the Rings and its characters as they see
fit.
It isn’t just the Tolkien estate and its charitable arm that
are suing Warner Brothers; it is also HarperCollins, the holder of the English
language rights to both Lord of the Rings and The
Hobbit. There is a lot at stake here for them as well. You now have a
tug-of-war to decide who controls the iconography of Tolkien’s masterworks and
their place in our society. On the one side you have the estate of the original
creator and the publisher of his works. On the other side, there is the company
behind one of the largest film franchises in history.
It is worth
pointing out that it was the production company that folded at the end of round
one between these two juggernauts. After laughably claiming that they didn’t
make any money at all on three of the highest-grossing films of all time, the
production company coughed up 7.5 percent of their profits to the Tolkien Estate
in order to settle a lawsuit that paved the way for the filming of The
Hobbit, according to the French paper Le Monde. We will see
if they try to pull the same “we didn’t make any money” stunt on the next three
films.
I've been wondering how this suit affects Air New Zealand's huge marketing drive centred around the Hobbit?
ReplyDeleteI'm cheering on the Tolkien estate on this one. The idea of marketing gambling products using characters from a children's book is absolutely disgraceful, and I'm pretty sure they won't get away with it in the U.K., whatever happens in the U.S. and elsewhere. Mark, I don't think that Air NZ need worry about this. What is really bugging the family is the use of the characters in crassly inappropriate contexts such as slot machines. I don't think they have a problem with an airline using them just to say, Look, NZ is really nice!
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