Now I want to see Steve Jacksons movies.

Quote from: TrinculoisdeadThe Tolkien Estate is under the control of Tolkien's grandson now that Christopher Tolkien has retired from that position. As far as I am aware.

Quote from: GameDaddyBzzzt. Completely Incorrect!

Quote from: TrinculoisdeadThe Tolkien Estate is not Middle Earth Enterprises. And vice versa.

Quote from: GameDaddyInteresting you should mention that, especially after I just did.

Well, not sure what the point of all that was.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1116025Well, not sure what the point of all that was.

1. As I originally stated, the Intellectual Property written by J.R.R. Tolkien is not under the control of anyone in Tolkien's immediate family. Hasn't been since the rights were sold to Middle Earth Enterprises in 1976 (Three years after J.R.R. Tolkien's Death). What you consider the Tolkien Estate, is in fact owned by Saul Zaentz. Under the original sales agreement the Tolkien family enjoys a share of the revenues, but has no say in what, and to whom, the Intellectual Property is Licensed.

2. Middle Earth Enterprises i.e. Saul Zaentz & Co.) have considerably enriched themselves by issuing expensive licenses to RPG game producers over the years only to repeatedly pull the license, or make the license too expensive to buy. This is ironic since it was the game producers and their gamer fans that kept supporting the fantasy literature as well as the associated games and media, and kept the IP in the awareness of the public, making it much easier for them to market, when they went to market with new movies and books.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1116025Well, not sure what the point of all that was.

Based on your quotes I'd say more GameDaddy spewing BS.

Quote from: GameDaddy;11160541. As I originally stated, the Intellectual Property written by J.R.R. Tolkien is not under the control of anyone in Tolkien's immediate family.

That not quite accurate. The literary estate is still controlled by the family and only the Hobbit and Lord the Rings was licensed to United Artists in the original agreement. Granted with the Lord of the Ring appendices there is a fair amount of extra material in there but it doesn't have the bulk of the Similarion, Unfinished Tales, etc.

I have chatted several times with James Spahn about the limitations that Cubicle had to labor under in writing TOR material. The short story that if it can't be found in either works then it not licensed.

Quote from: estar;1116062That not quite accurate. The literary estate is still controlled by the family and only the Hobbit and Lord the Rings was licensed to United Artists in the original agreement. Granted with the Lord of the Ring appendices there is a fair amount of extra material in there but it doesn't have the bulk of the Similarion, Unfinished Tales, etc.

I have chatted several times with James Spahn about the limitations that Cubicle had to labor under in writing TOR material. The short story that if it can't be found in either works then it not licensed.

  I've often wondered if ICE ever got into trouble for freely borrowing from the Silmarillion and UT in its works, or if they were just flying underneath the Estate's radar for the most part.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1116066I've often wondered if ICE ever got into trouble for freely borrowing from the Silmarillion and UT in its works, or if they were just flying underneath the Estate's radar for the most part.

Well the thing is that Tolkien dropped a lot of names and one-liners in Lord of the Rings. Didn't provide context for all of them but armed with the knowledge of the unlicensed work more could be done with the LoTR text then the Estate intended.

Kind of like how if you omit all the newer mechanics from the d20 SRD what left is a hop and a skip from an older edition of D&D.

I think since the movies everything is scrutinized more.

Quote from: estar;1116062I have chatted several times with James Spahn about the limitations that Cubicle had to labor under in writing TOR material. The short story that if it can't be found in either works then it not licensed.

I think Decipher had the same challenge with thier RPG.

Quote from: Aglondir;1116083I think Decipher had the same challenge with thier RPG.

Much to the frustration of Steve Long, who wrote a whole unpublished draft with all those references included merely for the satisfaction of 'doing it right.'

Quote from: estar;1116062That not quite accurate. The literary estate is still controlled by the family and only the Hobbit and Lord the Rings was licensed to United Artists in the original agreement. Granted with the Lord of the Ring appendices there is a fair amount of extra material in there but it doesn't have the bulk of the Similarion, Unfinished Tales, etc.

I have chatted several times with James Spahn about the limitations that Cubicle had to labor under in writing TOR material. The short story that if it can't be found in either works then it not licensed.

I believe that entirely. That also means the Cubicle license was exclusively a Middle Earth Enterprises License then. I pulled my copy of Silmarillion though, the publisher of the First American Edition, published in 1977 was George Allen, & Unwin, ltd. So yes, everything but The Hobbit and the LOTR  that has been published is still with the actual heirs of the Tolkien Estate, and they still publish under contract through George, Allen, & Unwin, which was purchased in a hostile takeover in 1990 by HarperCollins, the megapublishing house located in the U.K.

At the time I.C.E. lost its' license, Tolkien Enterprises pulled the license from them, not George, Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd., because in their annual Profit & Loss statement for 2001 (The year we bid on the bankruptcy auction) G,A&U Ltd. had posted a one and a quarter million pound loss and the winning bid for the intellectual property of I.C.E. was not included in their annual financial report.

This annual loss had been going on for some time, and basically HarperCollins coordinated publishing the books, was paying about a million and a half dollars a year to keep George, Allen, & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd. financially solvent, and when they bought them in 1990, they sold off all of G, A&U academic book publishing list to another academic publisher.

Based on my review of both companies, Tolkien Enterprises and Saul Zaentz likely pulled out the rug from underneath I.C.E., not George, Allen, & UnWin (Publishers) or HarperCollins. While I found many instances of Tolkien Enterprises/Middle Earth Enterprises suing people, and issuing cease & desists, I found only one instance coming from HarperCollins, and this was on behalf of Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien, and they sued both Warner Brothers (Makers of the Hobbit Trilogy and Buyers of New Line Cinema, producers of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings Movies)  and the Saul Zaentz Company for copyright infringement and breach of contract seeking damages of somewhere around eighty million dollars, and this occurred in 2012.

This case dragged on in court for awhile, and basically all the parties came together and made some kind of private agreement, Saul Zaentz died in 2014 so The Saul Zaentz Company is probably being run by by his nephew Paul Zaentz now. The case was dismissed with prejudice on July 5th, 2017, about a year after Saul's Lawyer died, after that all the parties came to the Judge with a request for dismissal. If I had to guess, I'd say Warner Bros. offered an acceptable private settlement to HarperCollins and Priscilla, but provided that with conditions based on how the licensing works now.

Middle Earth Enterprises handles Merchandising based upon the Books this includes merchandising(Toys, clothes, games, coffee cups, etc) , stage rights, and/or services based on the literary works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Warner Brothers handles Merchandising Based Upon the Films. This is for merchandising rights (Toys, clothes, games, coffee cups, etc) or services based on the artwork, from The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit film trilogies.

HarperCollins and their shell companies handle Other Book Rights namely the right to reproduce or utilize printed, published matter based upon The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and other literary works by J.R.R. Tolkien.

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With a civil case, when it is dismissed with prejudice, it can never be brought into the court again for consideration.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1116087With a civil case, when it is dismissed with prejudice, it can never be brought into the court again for consideration.

This is a simplification but the basic gist of the lawsuit in your post is that for the first time "Hollywood accounting" was a factor. Undoubtedly when given the statements the estate felt it was ridiculous considering the success of the films and everything related to the film.

Since Hollywood account stems from overly literal reading of contract terms, likely the estate decided to pull the same thing in regard to the original agreement. Having a line of Middle Earth gambling machines was just icing on the cake as far as stoking the anger of Christopher Tolkien and the estate.

That they reached a private agreement is no surprise considering the true amount of profit involved. Along with the fact what a copyright license grant made in the early 1970s cover today is not 100% certain. So there was a chance that Middle Earth Enterprises and the studio could lose out on one or more important points. Also likely the original agreement has been replaced with a more comprehensive license updated to reflect that Lord of the Rings is now a multi-media megahit.

As for I.C.E. I no opinion one way or the other on why they lost the license. I do feel that Cublicle 7's has published the best version of a Middle Earth RPG to date.

Quote from: estar;1116094This is a simplification but the basic gist of the lawsuit in your post is that for the first time "Hollywood accounting" was a factor. Undoubtedly when given the statements the estate felt it was ridiculous considering the success of the films and everything related to the film.

Since Hollywood account stems from overly literal reading of contract terms, likely the estate decided to pull the same thing in regard to the original agreement. Having a line of Middle Earth gambling machines was just icing on the cake as far as stoking the anger of Christopher Tolkien and the estate.

That they reached a private agreement is no surprise considering the true amount of profit involved. Along with the fact what a copyright license grant made in the early 1970s cover today is not 100% certain. So there was a chance that Middle Earth Enterprises and the studio could lose out on one or more important points. Also likely the original agreement has been replaced with a more comprehensive license updated to reflect that Lord of the Rings is now a multi-media megahit.

As for I.C.E. I no opinion one way or the other on why they lost the license. I do feel that Cublicle 7's has published the best version of a Middle Earth RPG to date.

I agree, I like it a lot as well, it was specifically written to work with D&D!

A few other interesting things of note, there is a new free-to-play Lord of the Rings MMO in the works, that was literally just kicked off a couple months ago. Check the Saul Zaentz website for more details on that. Don't know what's up with Lord of the Rings Online, has that been discontinued, or is it folding?

When D&D was first written in the 1970-1974 time frame, It was right when J.R.R. Tolkien died. Saul Zaentz originally bought the IP rights from United Artists in 1976 and arranged to have the Ralph Bakshi animated feature produced. The cease & desist was published by them to TSR in 1978, because both my original third printing and fourth printing of D&D, and some of the early fifth printing D&D white booksets included the Tolkien references. The D&D books that included Tolkien couldn't be destroyed because the publication of D&D including Tolkien References had predated the Saul Zaentz IP ownership, so they had no actual claim. They could and did have the Tolkien references removed from the later editions of D&D from later 5th printings on (White box with the red star, etc.) which is why they didn't utterly destroy TSR. Interesting, the history on that coming to light.

This was when merchandising IP was just starting to be a thing, and I don't think the publishing house HarperCollins or the actual Tolkien Estate Trust owned primarily by Christopher Tolkien at the time, was aware of how American intellectual property law worked exactly. Not even sure if Saul Zaentz knew, but his lawyer was a top notch IP lawyer because he managed to get a movie contract deal that included all the IP rights for merchandising as well from United Artists who had presumeably obtained those rights from either HarperCollins or the Tolkien Family Estate Trust. I don't think J.R.R. Tolkien ever actually did a movie deal, I'm going to research that. -- Strike that ... J.R.R.Tolkien did do a contract with United Artists in 1969 for a movie deal, for 7.5% royalties, which obviously included IP merchandising rights as well.

Lord of the Rings Online is still going strong and still releasing expansions.

https://www.lotro.com/en/game

Quote from: estar;1116107Lord of the Rings Online is still going strong and still releasing expansions.

https://www.lotro.com/en/game

Only until the license either gets yanked, or the fee gets upped to prohibitive levels.

So based on what I understand of the situation, It seems that ToR 2e will probably get released by some publisher at some stage?

But AiME is pretty much guaranteed as dead in the water now?

Anyone heard any other rumors regarding this since the initial news?