Copyright Absurdity Rules Over Amazon’s ‘The Rings Of Power’
from the one-copyright-to-rule-them-all dept
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is one of the best-known and best-loved modern works of literature, not least thanks to Peter Jackson’s films based on the cycle. Given that popularity, it’s no surprise that there was interest in creating adaptations of other Tolkien works. The result is “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”. According to Wikipedia:
Amazon bought the television rights for The Lord of the Rings for US$250 million in November 2017, making a five-season production commitment worth at least US$1 billion. This would make it the most expensive television series ever made.
A post on ScreenRant explains:
Tolkien chronicled tens of thousands of years of stories occurring prior to The Lord of the Rings. Some of these stories were referenced in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings trilogy, including the Appendices at the end of The Return of the King, but most of what’s known about that additional canon comes from other works by Tolkien published after his death, such as The Silmarillion, which The Rings of Power isn’t allowed to use for its own story.
The reason, of course, is copyright, because Amazon only has the rights to use “The Lord of the Rings” books, which include the appendices mentioned above. As the ScreenRant article notes, this has forced the team behind “The Rings of Power” to come up with clever but rather convoluted solutions in order to explain key elements of the earlier Tolkien world, without drawing on forbidden materials like “The Silmarillion“.
Some Tolkien fans are not happy about those divergences, but few are aware that copyright is to blame. The saga about new adaptations of the Tolkien epics is a perfect illustration of how copyright is not something that helps people to create, but can act as a serious obstacle to it that must be circumvented.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, or Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: copyright, creativity, j.r.r. tolkien, lord of the rings, rings of power, silmarillion
Companies: amazon
Comments on “Copyright Absurdity Rules Over Amazon’s ‘The Rings Of Power’”
Amazon spent $250 million and couldn’t be bothered to buy the stuff they actually wanted to use? That’s not copyright, that’s their stupidity.
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You evidently missed the quoted bit that said “isn’t allowed to use for its story“.
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It’s not that they “couldn’t be bothered”.
They bought the rights which ARE up for sale. While Tolkien sold the rights to adapt LOTR and The Hobbit back in the 60s, the rights to the material explicitly only depicted within The Silmarillion, published after his death, are being held on to by the Tolkien estate with an absolute refusal to allow anyone to adapt them ever.
This is why Rings of Power has to depict the abridged versions of the events depicted in that text, which are found within the appendices of LOTR. They have to dance around anything specifically detailed in The Silmarillion, and only use the material common to both works.
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I call BS on the estate-blaming. The estate was the one that reached out to the streaming services to get proposals. From the Hollywood Reporter:
“The call from the lawyers came in to Amazon on a Friday in 2017: The Tolkien estate was going to entertain proposals for a Lord of the Rings show….The estate has its gripes with Jackson’s adaptations (the late Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, said they “eviscerated” the books) but wasn’t interested in treading the same ground.”
Sounds like they were interested in moving beyond the LOTR focus.
not copyright
The fact that Amazon can’t use particular LOTR elements in their adaptation has nothing to do with copyright. The Tolkien Estate has already licensed those things to other entities.
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Guess what underpins the estates ability to license out Tolkien’s works for the last ~50 years?
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They have not licensed out adaptation rights for the Silmarillion to anyone, it’s one notable thing the Tolkien estate chooses not to allow, believing doing so for LOTR and The Hobbit was “A mistake”. As they are permitted to do under the laws of….. refresh my memory again?
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What do you think copyright is?
Re: LotR
It has everything to do with copyright.
What the heck do you think gave them the rights to license it to anyone in the first place?
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That logic’s not quite right. Copyright is why Amazon needs a license from the Tolkien estate specifically. Without copyright, though, said estate could still sell licenses, as could anyone else. And I think we’d have better results: the estate would have to compete, and convince the public they were providing a service more valuable than just some lawyer’s rubber stamp (and the complexity of this mythology does allow for lots of possibilities: story consistency, linguistic accuracy, characterization).
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“Without copyright, though, said estate could still sell licenses, as could anyone else”
Erm, I think I know what you’re trying to get at, but that’s wrong. If copyright didn’t exist (or these books were public domain), what the hell do you think a licence would be for? Everyone would already be allowed to do whatever they want with the material.
I think that what you mean is that without copyright, Amazon would be able to do what they wanted with or without the blessing of the estate. They could work with Amazon to create something closer to what they thought the author would have wanted, make a deal so that it could be advertised as the only “official” adaptation, or do other things to make they version stand out. They just wouldn’t be able to stop others from doing something with the material as well.
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The license would be permission for Amazon to do stuff Amazon could already legally do. Pointless, but not illegal (assuming there’s no fraud, such as claiming a license would be required). And if you look at the credits of a film or TV show, it’s actually incredibly common (like: getting permission to reference a brand, use a couple seconds of a song, or various other things that would be obvious fair use if subject to copyright at all).
In practice, I expect it would be more like what you describe in your second paragraph. I don’t know that the bare word “official” would have much meaning, but being able to say “made with the co-operation of the Tolkien Estate” or “approved by TolkienScholar123” would carry as much influence as those people had earned with the fans (as opposed to some authority that fell to heirs or lawyers “by accident”).
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The dead don't care
”Lord of the Rings” slaughtered about 15,000 good casualties, and about 93,000 evil casualties.
Each player in the present Russo-Ukrainian war is touting the same numbers, this proxy conflict is driven by the great intelligence of the DOD and of Elon Musk, born 400 kilometers from Ronald Tolkien’s birthplace.
I guess that wasn’t far enough:(
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Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
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This how I feel after reading that comment:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2nedgv
Won't someone think of the desiccated corpses of long-dead writers?!
But don’t you see, if all the characters, stories and worldbuilding Tolkien came up with couldn’t be locked up behind a copyright pay-wall then he’d have no motivation at all to write anything new!
Sure some might point out that the fact that the fact he’s been dead for just shy of five decades means he’s probably not going to be writing anything new any time soon, but just think of how unlikely new works would be if copyright didn’t last decades after the creator of a work was moldering in the ground, surely the odds would be downright non-existent then!
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Thank god the estate was here to protect the remaining works from being enjoyed or expanded upon… the way Tolkein would have wanted… rather than *checks notes* allowing them to be used the way Tolkein actually did. Does it still count as preserving a legacy if you completely change what the legacy is?
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2044 (the year Tolkien’s estate expires everywhere except the US unless © gets extended further) can’t come soon enough.
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I mean there were those 17 books that Christopher Tolkien spent 40 years editing and publishing.
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Of course, Christopher could’ve done that without copyright. Having been exposed to the material earlier and more thoroughly than anyone else is already quite an advantage.
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Given fan responses to what Brian Herbert did with the Dune universe, the benefits of “let the estate handle and protect the legacy” may still be an open question for sci-fi and fantasy fans…
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…you…do realize that every single one of the books we’re talking about, the ones Amazon doesn’t have the rights to, was published after Tolkien died, right?
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Based upon his son(with the assistance of another writer) collecting and compiling the works of his father into a coherent whole, though I’ll not argue against that being a herculean task and apparently he did a good amount of writing himself patching things together so I’ll grant that, though that just semi-sets the clock to two years instead of forty-nine as the ‘author’ in that case died in 2020.
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Yes!!! You shure nailed it!!! What would the creativity world be like if the spirits of the dead were given no incentive to create anything new!!! /s 🙂
As it is, only one person has ever bothered to continue creating stuff from beyond the grave, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s posthumous classic is tragically not on the best-sellers’ list anywhere!!! /s 🙂
Write your congresscritters ASAP and insist they read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s posthumous classic, and ask where Disney Corp is hiding Walt Disney’s posthumous works … /s 🙂
Tolkien got burned with the first release of LOTR
The Ballentine copies of the trilogy had a preface from JRRT about buying the Ballentine published books as his first publisher didn’t pay him. Note that by then, he’d written The Hobbit and the Trilogy. His subsequent works were largely unproffitable at the time. He made an LP of the songs and poetry that only die hard fans like me bought. Tolkien himself said that his motivation for writing the sagas was as an exploration of the construction of language. I am pretty sure he was motivated to write by more things than $ profit.
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So are the vast majority of writers—and artists in general, really.
just another fuck up, thanks to the way copyright etc is not just allowed but freely given in the USA. as usual, the ones who dip out are the public, the fans, the followers and all because of greed!!
Disregarding the fact that copyright duration itself is one of the biggest bullshits of contemporary times, I’m astonished how copyrights can be used to effectively block competition and hamper creativity.
There should be a common copyright pool to avoid such idiocy. You want to stream/adapt/whatever some content? Pay exactly the same amount others will to the pool and the copyrights owner will still get the money from the revenue and won’t be able to benefit one company/person in detriment of all others. Either you provide equal, reasonable access or you keep it to yourself.
Public domain
When will The Silmarillion become public domain?
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2090.
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J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, so 2044 in the rest of the world. The Silmarillion was published in 1977, so that won’t be public domain until 2072 in the US (unless © gets retroactively extended further).
The absolute biggest heaps of bullshit ever produced was how © terms got to be so insanely long in the first place.
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So just 50 more years before anyone who wants can make adaptations of it in the US! Oh I’ll probably be dead… thanks copyright.
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Might I suggest that in the case of Tolkien’s Legendarium, we refer to the Public domain instead as “The Undying Lands”, the place where fictional works can live on forever, rather than being snuffed out before their time by copyright.
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Or we could call it “the public domain”. God, why do some people want to turn everything into a pop culture reference…
I love how several of the people claiming that the series are wrong either read it in libraries or were able to enjoy the books because the rights were lost in US till they changed the law
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Not a copyright issue
Amazon didn’t use “convoluted solutions” to solve copyright-induced issues…. they intentionally ignored and re-wrote the professor’s work to push their political message. Can’t be pushing the cis-normative, western supremacist rantings of some old, dead white man, can we? I mean… according to Amazon, Tolkien’s works always were ‘fascist adjacent’, and tended to attract a white supremacist audience. They just fixed the problematic aspects. Any deviance from canon is strictly for our own good.
Exactly how far has Amazon’s reach gotten? Even a second-rate tech site talking about legal issues still manages to shill for their failure.
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[citation needed]
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Surprised you didn’t use the word “woke” there, chief.
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You just made the kind of complaints only a fascist would make.
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.. said nobody mentally competent, ever.
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If you don’t like something, the easiest way to send a message is not to watch it. Imagine if you’re the majority you claim to be, and you simply don’t watch the series or cancel your accounts because you might be exposed to something horrific like… fantasy creatures not being portrayed by a specific human race of actor or writers taking artistic licence with an adaption….
I mean, I appreciate you people explicitly stating that you’re fascists, but I’d prefer it if you let the free market so many of you claim to support take control with things like this. If you stuck to what you wanted to see and encouraged the market to make more of them instead of complaining about how sexy the new M&Ms are and the fact that a character that everyone knew was gay was finally able to state it, we’d all be better off. There’s so many more important issues at hand
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Another wet-dream fairy tale lesson of how to improve our world
Thankyou, and thank god we in the US only applaud the wholesale slaughter and removal of thousands with a morally relevant difference.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, so that they may rule” NIV Genesis 1:26
How did Ronald obtain a derivative work license from the holder of the original copyright, when God has been dead since Darwin?
I love how the last sentence is a non-sequitur given the article that preceded it.
A non sequitur is a conclusion that does not logically follow from the argument that precedes it, in case anyone were wondering.
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Re: A language can not describe itself
“Fascist” is a bundle of sticks: a mass of Corporations that make up the Government of a State.
The Logo of the Tory Party in the UK is a tree, so reducing the National Health Service to a logo© and un-taxing the rich is logical.
My “conclusion that does not logically follow” ?
You’re constrained by the conditioned limits of your logic: War is a tool of cultural expansion. The necessary mayhem and destruction, and the resultant transfer of resources and markets (and profitable re-construction) must subsume all other logical alternative possibilities.
The Greeks subsumed logical alternatives with Theater, see “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” .
This was done by limiting our “first Amendment” in the US, see Wilson’s Sedition and Espionage Act : fail. But wait for it
George Lucas has more money than the next 50 Directors in the world, combined. This fact only excludes Spielberg, who has also produced a handful of films selling war, and a few more WWII cartoon movies
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George Lucas has more money than....
the next 27, or 12 or.. Whatever.
My data is from the web a few years ago, thus we are in the alternative fact epoch. A thousand feet from here, see https://www.dezeen.com/2022/09/23/mad-lucas-museum-narrative-art-construction-los-angeles/ Obviously a warship disseminating enterprise out of the barrel of a
Forced neutrino inverter
Molecular decay detonator
Pheromonic sensor
Variable geometry detonator
Dopterian interceptor
Echo Papa 607
Hunter probe
Chroniton,
Gravimetric,
Photonic, or Transphasic torpedo
Isolytic burst
Forced neutrino inverter
Kinetic detonator
Molecular decay detonator
Pheromonic sensor
Biogenic charge
Cobalt diselenide
Metagenic weapon
Microvirus (genetic virus)
Nano-biogenic weapon
Neurolytic pathogen
Prion
Teplan
Transgenic weapon
Trilithium resin
Varaxian LM-7
Ahn-woon
Glavin
Kar’takin
kleegat
kligat
Kuttar
Lirpa
Nisroh
Ushaan-tor
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lmao were you fucking high when you posted this
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I risked my browser to have a quick look and… probably. The story linked is about how a building funded by the Chinese will feature some artworks from George Lucas, and how it changed location due to concerns about its size in other cities.
I’d be interested to see some citations about how the building is actually intended to do something other than that, but I’m guessing that “Chinese” and “sci-fi” combined some random thoughts in a part of the internet that only occasionally arrives in these saner parts of the net.
Re: Re: Re: Huh? Selling the product war, not making war
Architecture studio MAD have an address of 12 Western Avenue Petaluma, CA 94952, and design mega-projects all over the world.
I spoke to George’s X, Marcia Lucas at Kerner last September about the many-billion dollar monstrosity that is a thousand yards from me.
Petaluma, Skywalker Ranch, Marcia & George’s house in San Anselmo, Kerner (ILM) and Lucas Digital (was an Army Bio-warfare Lab) are on US101 30 miles apart.
Selling the most expensive product never stops, thus wholesale slaughter is the rule in fantasy.
I printed a short-list of the WMDs Star Trek uses to push enterprise past the unwilling.
Biden has approved about $90b to Northrop for new ICBMs, $11b to upgrade the Savanna River 300 square mile DoD reservation for new pits, two new $30b Nuke power plants (units 3&4) to supply weapons-grade Plutonium and Tritium for our new bomb designs.
Must i go on:)
Must i go on:)
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What in the actual hell are you talking about and what relevance does it have to this article?
We already have incoherent trolls around here. Don’t become one of them because you think it’d be funny—because I can assure you that it isn’t.
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