Lawsuit by Tolkien Estate may halt The Hobbit

[davem]

Originally Posted by PrinceOfTheHalflings

One last thing - all bets are off when the copyright expires on the books, because then anyone will be able to make films of them, but that won't be for a while yet!

Copyright is now 'The Tolkien Trust' rather than 'JRR Tolkien' (some have suspected that's the real reason for the 300-400 changes made to LotR for the 50th anniversary edition...,not that I would indulge in such cynicism ...but

The war broke out in America at an early stage of Tolkien's literary career. He was not, at that time, as rich and famous as he soon would become. Early in 1965, Ace Books was planning to issue an unauthorised paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings. Because of the state of American copyright the publisher probably thought that this could be done with impunity. No royalty payment was, at first, offered to the author.

Tolkien's authorised American publishers, Houghton Mifflin, decided to issue their own paperback ASAP. In order to register the new edition as copyright, Tolkien made a number of changes in the text, so that it was technically a new bookhttp://miltonbatiste.tripod.com/oneisacrowd/id4.html.

), so it may not expire 70 yrs after Tolkien's death - or at all.