The hoax is related to filming, which means that it's the studio's problem and nothing to do with Tolkien's estate. The only thing that worries me is that Peter Jackson might decide that Mordor would make a really good setting for three hours of completely new story (replacing extraneous rubbish like the conversation with Smaug) and that Alberta is the perfect place to shoot it.
As for the wider implications of the Estate's activities, I can admit to being completely wrong about their enforcement of the use of Tolkien's image and identity in fiction. I overreact occasionally to what look like attacks on Christopher Tolkien when the Tolkien Estate does something draconian. I dislike the conflation of Christopher Tolkien, the Tolkien Estate and the Estate's legal representatives, and I don't like the idea that the Estate aren't entitled to defend their rights against even their fans just because we buy the product. I'll admit, though, that I've been concerned by several of the Estate's activities of late, particularly in the suppression of
Wheelbarrows at Dawn (which I can't imagine said anything damaging about anyone) and the assault on the Tolkien Society a few years back over the use of the Tolkien name. I am concerned that the Estate is making enemies of people who should rightly be its friends and its reasoning looks increasingly shaky. In the absence of further information, though, I shan't be blaming any one person.
As for the wider area of the use of factual people and events in fiction, I still hold that we ought to have progressed somewhat since Shakespeare's day. He did not have the artistic freedom to say what he liked, even if it was true; and I suspect that he would have said whatever pleased Queen Elizabeth anyway. Somebody has be a writer's patron. I object to people altering history for the sake of a good story, whilst still presenting the good story as history. That leads to all the dearly held national myths that keep people fighting wars five-hundred years after the original disagreement - which was like as not about who owned an egg. Shakespeare is only the worst offender in the English literary pantheon, followed no less ably by Scott and many, many others.
I'll address a couple of the examples, because I love to derail conversations by concentrating on minutiae. I'm sure that we're all in agreement that King Arthur isn't a real person. A mythological conflation of five or more different people is not an historical figure, and by the time Malory got his hands on him, such luminaries as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes had already removed what little personality was left and replaced the man with an ideal. In fact, Malory invents surprisingly little of the modern Arthur myth, being content to retell the story he was told, which had already been exported from Wales to France and thence to England and everywhere else. Even if somehow one could trace all the threads of Arthur back past Gildas and into real history, there wouldn't be one man, but several, one of whom may have been called something that can be rendered in Latin as
Artorius. I once even read a serious argument that Arthur was Cerdic. I'd say that's fair game; indeed, I'd say that's an invitation to imagine.
The King's Speech - a very enjoyable film - suffered to my mind from its incomprehensible character assassination of Archbishop Lang. The villain of the film was obviously George VI's speech impediment, with the Austrian bogeyman waiting in the wings, so there was no need to make one out of a man who built his clerical career on work in deprived inner cities.
Titanic, the value of which resides solely in its reconstruction of the ship, repeated a myth that J. Bruce Ismay gave orders that caused the entire disaster, when contemporary inquests hostile to him proved no such thing. These instances perpetuate the myth that everything is the fault of one bad person who has something to gain, or that a hero will come along and save us from the bad people. If only either of those things were true.
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I can't agree with your definition of fiction, which sounds more like propaganda. Good fiction shouldn't be agenda-led, should have little to do, primarily, with beliefs and opinions; it should be more to do with the desire to perform a skill; pleasing others, not yourself; and only pleasing yourself when you trust yourself to please others
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I said that writing embodies the views of its writers, not that it's always intended to promote an agenda. Tolkien wrote books that embody a Christian world view, but he wasn't pursuing an agenda. Writing sympathetic character who embodies all that we dislike is, for example, not easy. It's even harder to write a wise character who gainsays plausibly our own deeply held beliefs, or to write an outcome that we consider implausible. It is impossible to escape from our beliefs and presuppositions about the nature of the universe and humanity's place therein, hence writers embody their outlook in their work even when they don't mean to do so.
And that's all I have time for this evening. I may be back to say more later.