"Lord of the Rings" sequel!

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by radagast

Do not copyrights pertain only to published works? There have been other fantasies that have mentioned the word "hobbit" for instance. The copyrights should pertain only to all of Tolkien's works.

I'm clearly being a little dense today, but I don't quite get the connection between those two sentences.

For the first: what are you trying to say? If you mean you can always write fan fiction as long as you don't try to publish it or make money from it, well, yes. What's the problem?

For the second– are you sure about that? D&D has "halflings", but I can't recall "hobbit" being used anywhere but Tolkien. Certainly not in novels.

Originally Posted by radagast

And in regards to what could be written, after I started writing down my ideas, I found that several aspects had already been mentioned by Tolkien. Copyrights are not for an infinite length of time either.

No, but they have a fairly long shelf-life.