Film Rights to First & Second Age

[Sauron the White]

William .. the use of the strawman does not serve you well. Where in any of my posts on this subject do I state that Christopher should have been stopped, restrained, restricted, or otherwise prohibited from publishing THE SILMARALLION?

In fact, I said the direct opposite. I stated that I was glad he did so.

here it is for your benefit

please understand that I am not finding any fault or error with Christopher putting together the SIL or finding a publisher for it. I am very glad that he did it.

How can you construe that to constitute advocacy of prevention of publishing?

Where did I say that I supported any effort by Saul Zaentz to do the same?

I have stated before and will restate again in slightly different terms so perhaps we can better understand each other.

If lawyers for the Estate were asked to write down the rights regarding the Silmarallion or other material touched upon in the Appendicies, what do you think they would have to say about that?

And now lets put the same shoe on the other foot. If lawyers for Zaentz were asked to do exactly the same thing regarding their rights, what do you think they would have to say about that?

I do not need an answer.

What I would like is an admission that there is a high probability that those two lists would NOT BE THE SAME. I would speculate that the Estate would claim the film rights owned are far more limited than Zaentz would claim. And I speculate that the rights claimed by Zaentz would be much broader than those that would be conceded by the Estate.

Why would this be so? And this directly leads into the discussion here over and over again as to why we - who have no vested financial interest in either one - cannot agree about who owns what and what they can do with it.

The answer is the selling of the rights by JRRT and the eventual publishing of much of that same material by CT years later. Both give the holders a legal claim.

Right now, today even, minds other than ours are trying to comb these materials to see what they will use in two upcoming movies about Middle-earth. And I am willing to speculate that a few years down the road their will be more heated debate about who did what and what rights were violated.

This is not a question of one party having all the rights and the other party having none. Clearly, both parties have rights that can be said to interlock and overlap.
I would think it incumbent on both parties to sit down and attempt some mutual satisfactory understanding of both of their respective set of rights.