[LadyBrooke]

I fear I'm not being very coherent with my thoughts in this thread. Yes, people have a right to privacy. However when you chose to publish a book or do anything else to become famous you surrender some of that. I do not support scandalous information being released just because it's scandalous, however, I know many people who do. It's a fact of life that, especially with the recent invention of Myspace and Facebook, some people want to know everything they can about everyone else.

The main thing that bothers me is not the fact that they want to keep some things private but the vehemence with which they do so. Nobody is denying the facts in this case, that Tolkien wrote a letter to one of his relatives, that relative had a book written about him, and the Tolkien Estate blocked the release of the book because it contained the contents of that letter. And that's what bothers me. If I had a secret that I didn't want to become public knowledge, I would not write it down in a letter and mail it to somebody. In fact, I assume that anything I write about my personal life may be published in the newspaper if I one day decide to run for a political office or something. I don't care if technically it can be argued that the letter cannot be published because it's my intellectual property. If you give somebody a document on which you've written anything, unless you have a prior arrangement that the person will not show it to anybody and burn it after reading, there is always the chance that it will end up public knowledge. Yes, it can be argued that the Tolkien's children have a right to keep their father's personal life private. It can also be argued that the Tolkien Estate is trampling over the freedoms of the letter recipient's family by forbidding this book to be published.