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Originally Posted by Davem
I've asked for the posts I deleted to be re-instated.
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Davem, thanks for that.
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Originally Posted by Davem
And the real issue here is: privacy vs knowledge. The Estate is using Copyright law to protect the privacy of the family (or the FAMILY). Yet in order to do this they are preventing the publication of a serious work of biography. Is this acceptable. Of course, no-one likes to be embarrassed, or be made to look silly- or even to have grandad, or great aunt Mary shown to have been a bit silly back in the day. But is that sufficient justification to stop a biography of great uncle George's family being published? Or in other words, setting aside our own discomfort with being made to look a bit daft, & our equal discomfort with seeing our family or people we respect being discomforted in that way, is that enough of a reason to stop a book being published - bacuse what is being done here is not a trivial thing. There is zero difference bewteen preventing a book being published in the first place & burning every copy of it after its been published in the second place. The Estate, in order to protect the 'privacy' of the FAMILY have effectively 'burned' this book. From that point of view this behaviour cannot be simply brushed aside with cuddlsome statements about 'privacy'. Using Copyright law as match & petrol in this way is a very questionable procedure - burning books is a big thing (or even a BIG THING).
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Now,
davem, I've already stated why I think using copyright for the purpose of protecting privacy is not
necessarily heinous (it just depends). I think this is pretty clearly something on which you and I are never going to agree, so we may as well leave it. (I will say, though, that I find your equation of demanding the removal of material from a book with burning every copy of it to be a fairly notable bit of hyperbole.)
More to the point is whether the suppression of scandalous, or at least embarrassing, facts
is "what is being done here". Now, as far as my memory of it goes* you spent the thread talking yourself into being totally convinced it
was– you started out with an "if" and ended up with a "must"– and apparently you even made up a little humorous dialogue about it. The problem is– again as I've already stated– you've got no actual evidence for this (that I'm aware of) beyond the Tolkien Estate's self-description as "the guardian of these rights and of the privacy of the Tolkien family", if that counts as evidence; neither have you put forward any new supporting arguments for quite a while. You just keep repeating the same thing. I think you'll find
that, and not the fact that you tried to be funny, is what got you "shot down", as you put it.
None of this is to say that I'm giving a stamp of approval to what the Estate has done, by the way. I've already said I think they're likely being petty and obstructive.
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davem's posts haven't yet been replaced at time of writing.