First, I confess I hadn't fully thought through how to map the various heroes and villains of ‘Kill the Hobbit’ back onto ‘The Hobbit.’ But on reflection, this drawing seems a bit off. In my version of the story, the hobbit is the villain, stealing gold from the people of New Zealand (I guess to take back to Hollywoodshire?) This would make Smaug the dragon the public, and Smaug’s giant pile of gold the commonwealth (that’s why it’s so large). Smaug should be casting the Expecto Patronum (EP) spell to banish the Hobbit, not the other way around.

But hey, people may see it differently, and their right to publish those perspectives on our common culture is part of what’s at stake in ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ (pivoting here to New Zealand’s support for the IP-enforcement-on-steroids Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement).

So with that in mind, I am happy to announce the ‘Kill the Hobbit to Save Regular Earth’ Initiative– KH2SREI for short (pronounced Kisstory, after the ancient Elven admonition to beware Hobbits bringing gifts).

I invite you to flesh out the Kisstory allegory in whatever direction makes most sense to you. If you send me pictures, I will publish them here (as long as they are not obscene or gratuitously nasty). I will even try to talk the good people at Bloomberg View into running them. And if we get enough submissions we will have a public vote to award copies of the “semi-epic” Media Piracy in Emerging Economies to the two most worthy entries (plus whatever other awards we can accumulate in the meantime.)

As for those "other awards", we're throwing a Techdirt t-shirt into the mix. So if you're a creator, whatever your medium, we hope you'll submit something! Head on over to the contest page for more details and some "extra points" guidelines, including a "Special award for the best pro-Hobbit, pro TPPA, pro Warner Bros art, if we get any" because hey, political cartoons can cut both ways.

How much taxpayer money can Warner Bros. demand from the government of New Zealand to keep production there (rather than, say, in Australia or the Czech Republic)? That answer turns out to be about $120 million, plus the revision of New Zealand's labor laws to forbid collective bargaining among film-production contractors, plus the passage of three-strikes Internet-disconnection laws for online copyright infringement, plus enthusiastic and, it turns out, illegal cooperation in the shutdown of the pirate-friendly digital storage site Megaupload and the arrest of its owner, Kim Dotcom.

[...] The U.K. government found this out in 2005, when Warner Bros. threatened to move "Harry Potter" productions to the Czech Republic. The government of Gordon Brown caved in to studio demands and passed new subsidies. In 2009, New Zealand also gave in and now faces demands for more.

The worst part is that, for most of the wannabe Hollywoods, it's bad economic policy on every level. The productions bring in mostly low-end, temporary jobs, while the high-end jobs remain in Hollywood or New York. Call it the Curse of Harry Potter.

One way to break the curse is to route public money through what we might call an Expecto Patronum license -- named after the powerful defensive charm in the Potter series. Under the license, public money takes the form of a conditional loan rather than a grant or tax break. After five years, producers have a choice: Pay back the loan or re-release the film under a Creative Commons attribution license, which would allow it to be shown freely.

If a film is among the few that have longer-term commercial value, its producers can choose the first path. If it isn't, they lose nothing by taking the second route. The license thus underwrites creative risk-taking without squandering public money on blockbusters. It also ensures that public investment generates public culture -- not works controlled by the studios for the next 95 years.

"When it's an established business, we like to get the company to acknowledge they are using our trademarks, stop selling infringing articles and then we will grant them a licence for a nominal fee - approximately $100 a year."

"We asked to them to contact us and amicably resolve this and are open to any suggestions they have. I'd be glad to raise a pint with them the next time I'm over."

Frankly, it sounds like Zaentz is just trying to smooth over the PR nightmare he was facing. It's hard to amicably resolve a dispute with someone who is already threatening you with legal action. Friendly negotiations come before threats, not after. Why didn't Zaentz just offer them the license in the first place? His description of the process is basically "meet all of our demands, then we'll talk."

All the coverage of this story mentions trademarks and copyrights in passing, without ever being clear about what rights were supposedly violated. Either way, it's entirely possible that SZC does have a valid legal claim here, on at least some of the things the pub was doing—but if they want to pursue those claims, then they have to face the backlash from people who think they are being petty. They can't just make it all okay by offering to have a beer together, while their lawyers still lurk in the wings.