Hell, can you blame them? I LIKE DC, but had I been publisher of Marvel at the time (late 60s? early70s? whenever) I’d have done it too.
Course, I’m a jackass.
One of the very difficult issues whenever dealing with these sorts of issues WRT J.R.R. Tolkein, is the extent to which his unique creations are blended with obscure elements of historical myth. The ‘hobbit’ brouhaha is a case in point–in actual fact, ‘halfling’ is the term which JRRT apparently invented (as a Westron term for the hobbits), while the term ‘hobbit’ was lifted from obscure Germanic (IIRC) myth and should really be considered public domain. But ‘halfling’ sounds generic, and ‘hobbit’ sounds unfamiliar and invented, so that fight went the other way.
(Another fun one was when TSR’s Dragon magazine published a semi-scholarly bit on Norse myth, which detailed a character named Durin, who was supposed to be the father of the dwarven race. This prompted a somewhat snotty warning letter from the Tolkein estate, claiming their exclusive right to that name under that literary concept. To which the original author gently replied that, in fact, Durin was the name of that personage in recorded myth–he and JRRT were raiding the same common source. JRRT just hadn’t mentioned what source that was …)
This does not ring correct.
Wikipedia has a good breakdown of the debate over the origen of the word. Specifically The Denham Tracts.
In the Professors own words:
Jim
Indeed. I own a copy of this edition, so there’s no doubt about it.
But there’s always unfair competition. 
JRB
It may not ring correct to you, but it is absolutely 100% correct. “Hobbit” was a term used in folklore long before Tolkien used it. If he forgot about it, or tried to claim otherwise, that’s fine, but the word was there.
And, as a general comment on the whole thread, why is it that so many people who know nothing about copyright and trademark law feel the need to chime in everytime one of these threads starts? You cannot trademark ideas, or words, or short phrases, or titles. Period, full stop. And just because you’re only familiar with a word from a certain author’s (or comic book company’s) use of it doesn’t mean that it hadn’t already existed for a long time prior. And just because something was pulled from a book or someone complained it doesn;t automatically mean that it was a copyright violation or that that’s how it went down. And the whole Duran thing wasn’t a threatened lawsuit, it was just some schlupp writing a letter to the editor after the name was used on a Norse name list, unless there was some actual lawsuit threat later, which I sincerely doubt.
I don’t know much about copyright law, but I am pretty sure that Durin I has a patent on the way you treat mithril in the process of making coats of armor out of it.
Actually, Fawcett still owned Captain Marvel at that time. It wasn’t until 1972 that DC got the rights to him.
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Marvel did not copyright the name “Captain Marvel.” Names and short phrases cannot be copyrighted.
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What unfair use might DC have been making of the name “Captain Marvel”? Captain Marvel was a Fawcett character long before there was a Marvel Comics and currently DC owns the rights to the character and he appears in stories under the name “Captain Marvel.” Arguably, DC is restricted only in using the name “Captain Marvel” as a trademark and I’m not even sure what the parameters of that might be.
And, most likely, he couldn’t have. You can’t trademark a term merely because you’re the first to use it. You must be using that term as an identifier of the source of goods or services. In other words, in order to trademark the term “Mitrhril,” Tolkien would have to be selling something under the name “Mithril.”
Concepts are not protectable under copyright law or trademark law. Copyright law protects only creative expression and cannot be extended to the ideas underlying that expression,. Trademark law protects only marks that are used to identify the source of goods or services, not ideas.
No.
The only kind of intellectual property protection applicable to ideas is patent law and patent law protects only novel, useful, and non-obvious inventions. Entirely imaginary beings would not qualify as patentable inventions.
My understanding of the DC/Marvel fight over “Captain Marvel” is as follows:
DC owns the character Captain Marvel, and can publish books featuring him, but Marvel owns the trademark on the NAME “Captain Marvel” and so DC cannot title a comic book “Captain Marvel.” That’s why his book is always named “Shazam!”
That makes sense to me and it was also my guess, but I didn’t know enough about the issue. I have a similar guess about DC’s character Deathstroke (the Terminator), who when he was introduced was simply known as the Terminator. They came up with a new name when they realized that they couldn’t use “Terminator” as the title of a publication.
It’s my understanding that you have to use a trademark in order to keep it. Has Marvel kept publishing “Captain Marvel” comic books?
Yes. And they always seem to have at least one active character called “Captain Marvel.”