Is Tolkien's 'Ring' trilogy in the public domain?

Factual Questions
1

Or what? Here’s yet another “Lord of the Rings” movie coming out, with real people this time (Ian McKellan as Gandalf), release date of next Christmas. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m out of the loop as usual).

Anyway, it can’t possibly be in the public domain, can it? I thought they changed the copyright laws to make them more retroactively enforceable, if that’s the phrase I want. Do all these filmmakers have to pay royalties? Or is it free, like Dickens? That’s the only reason I can think of to account for it.

We just had an animated Hobbit last year, didn’t we? Came and went real fast.

2

Nope, the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate still rules with an iron hand over all things Tolkien. From languages, to books, to mythology.

3

Let’s see. The Hobbit was published in 1937. Copyright protection for pre-1978 works is for 28 years plus an optional renewal term of 67 years. I’ll assume the copyright was renewed, so that’s a total of 95 years from 1937. So The Hobbit will enter the public domain in 2032. The Lord of the Rings was published in 1955 or so, so it will enter the public domain in 2050.

It’s interesting that under the copyright law at the time The Hobbit was published, it would have been public domain in 1993. But the Copyright Act of 1976 extended that retroactively another 39 years. Bummer.

Another thing to remember is that if Tolkien goes public domain, than so will most of the famous Disney animated movies. Since Disney has a lot of money and doesn’t want their movies to be free, there’s a good chance the dates will be pushed back again at some point.

4

The Estate has asked me to inform you that royalty checks are expected from all participants in this thread.

Please send $1.09 (check or money order) to:
The Ring Foundation
C/O Bilbo Baggins
Dirt Mound #2
Calabasas, CA 93612

5

Don’t make us break your short hobbit legs, Weasel ^-^

6

What are you, Diceman? A Boggie from the Sty?

7

Peter Jackson has the rights. I am sure the family is going to do very well if these movies take off.

What do you mean about “all these movies”? The other movies were all the animated versions about 20 years ago.

8

Duck Duck Goose writes:

> We just had an animated Hobbit last year, didn’t we?

No, we didn’t. What are you thinking of here? (Where do you live? I know that there was a high-tech stage version of The Hobbit in Australia in 1999 and 2000.) The only animated version of The Hobbit came out in 1978.

He further writes:

> Do all these filmmakers have to pay royalties?

Yes, they do. Let me note though that the authorization wasn’t as simple as just the Tolkien family selling the rights to Peter Jackson, the director of the upcoming film. They sold the cinematic rights for the films a long time ago. It’s not clear to me if they get royalties whenever a film version of the books is made, but they certainly no longer have the right to stop a film from being made. A number of producers optioned the film rights to the book in succession, but each decided that they couldn’t do it right. Eventually the animated version in 1977 got made. Eventually the rights got sold to the people making the upcoming film.

There was a 1980 animated film called The Return of the King that wasn’t authorized by whoever then owned the rights. It was made by the same people who made the authorized 1978 version of The Hobbit. They apparently thought that because the copyright of The Lord of the Rings was in dispute in the U.S., they could make a film from it without paying anyone. After the film came out, they were threatened with a lawsuit by whoever did control the rights, and they agreed to pay something to them, so the film is still in circulation.

9

Um. Wasn’t there another copyright change sometime around 1998/99? I seem to remember much lamenting on the Book People (Project Gutenberg, Internet Public Library, n such frequent) mailing list around then. Something about books due to be public domain, but the date getting pushed back 20 years.
Apparently a lot of these books weren’t pulling in cash, but there’s pretty much zero incentive for people to make them public domain even if they were aware that they weren’t.

Everyone blamed the Mouse.

10

Let me note further that the fact that a literary work is still in copyright has nothing to do with whether the rights are owned by the author, his family, or anyone remotely related to them. Sometimes an author will sell the rights to his works during his lifetime, so he will not be getting the royalties even though he is still alive and the book is in copyright. Often after an author’s death, rights are sold by the family, so although someone is being paid royalties, it’s not a relative of the author.

For instance, no one other than the actual owners and their agents knows who presently owns the C. S. Lewis estate. Lewis’s stepsons sold all rights in the '70’s. It’s presently controlled by a company called C. S. Lewis Pte., but that company is entirely owned by a shell company. Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the ultimate control of the rights.

11

The rights were last purchased in 1978 by a Shadow corporation of the U.S. government, who proceeded to make minor, but significant changes to hide certain facts from the American people… It is worth mentioning that this same corporation owns The Gap, and KFC. Anyone who owns an original version of the books should compare the text carefully to a post '78 version, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

This post will self-destruct in 10 seconds…

12

Okay, Bonzo has since informed me that what I must be thinking of is some kind of Internet-only download trailer/teaser for this movie, from last year. All I remember is seeing some kind of TV ad campaign last spring/summer for what I thought was yet another Lord of the Rings movie.

13

There is a Tolkein movie in the works. Actually, there are three. The first will be released Christmas 2001, the second Xmas 2002, the third Xmas 2003. They’re being directed by Peter Jackson, and shooting just wrapped in New Zealand. The budget is astronomical (in NZ terms), and the production is going to great lengths to be as accurate as possible while still making the compromises necessary to translate a literary work to the screen.

A lot of Tolkein fanatics are gritting their teeth – “The books never say Elves have pointy ears! the whole thing is ruined now! boo hoo hoo.” As you can tell, I don’t have a lot of respect for this view. Everything I’ve seen of the upcoming movies leads me to believe they’ll be totally respectful, and little short of incredible. (For example, they’ve actually retained several linguists, experts in Tolkein’s invented languages, to advise them. Take that, Bakshi.) They won’t be perfect representations of Tolkein’s work, but then, how could they be? What color are Wormtongue’s eyes, for example? All readers bring themselves and their own imaginations to the experience to some extent, so perfection for all viewers is an impossible goal. Yeah, sure, it’s possible they’ll get really screwed up, but the more I learn about it, the better I feel.

Contrast this with the upcoming Harry Potter movie. I had high hopes for it, but the more I learn about it, the more afraid I get, and the less likely I think it is to avoid sucking.

Do a search for “Tolkein” to unearth (or un-middle-earth, har har) some previous threads where the project is discussed in more detail.

14

Interesting to note that many of the early Oz books by L. Frank Baum are now public domain, and there is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating your own stage play or movie version!

Mind you, this is just in reference to the original text. Obviously, you won’t be able to use text or songs from the 1939 movie version until many years from now…

15

With an interesting answer:

Yes, “Lord of the Rings” was at one time in the public domain in the U.S.

Forget date of copyright; that’s the current law. We’re talking about the old law, which was much more restrictive.

LOTR was published in England, so was copyrighted under British law. Before an American publisher was found, copies were imported into the U.S.

Foul!

Under the old copyright law, if you imported a certain number of copies of a foreign-published book into the US, you could not register copyright in the US and the work would fall into the public domain. LOTR went over the limit.

Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books had been negotiating with Tolkien’s publisher to publish LOTR in the US. They had refused, preferring a classy hardcover edition to Ace’s cheap paperbacks. When Wollheim learned of the loophole, he rushed out LOTR in paperback, uncopyrighted.

The books did fairly well. Wollheim didn’t pay Tolkien a cent. Eventually, SFWA made him a member and forced Wollheim to pay up (Wollheim claimed he always intended to pay, but couldn’t find Tolkien’s address).

Eventually, Tolkien made changes to the books (most obviously, adding the backmatter – maps and glossaries) and was able to copyright that. Ballentine Books got the paperback rights. If you look on the back of the old Ballentine Books paperbacks, you’ll see a notice from Tolkien saying that these are the authorized edition and that you should buy that. The Ace books eventually went off the market.

The interesting legal point is the status of the Ace editions. Usually once something’s PD, it’s PD forever, and LOTR doesn’t have a soundtrack so it can be brought back (like “It’s A Wonderful Life”). It would be a very interesting legal case if someone took the PD text from the Ace books and published it (only in the US, BTW). I don’t know if they can claim copyright infringement, though there may be trademarks involved.

16

There are various versions of the story of the initial loss of the American copyright on The Lord of the Rings. It’s hard to tell whose version you should believe, since many people have good reason to lie about this.

One version I’ve read said that American copyright law allowed a publisher to import up to 1,250 copies of a book before it was necessary to apply for a copyright. Apparently this loophole was set up for academic books that were published abroad that were never expected to sell to anybody but a small number of libraries. Apparently Allen & Unwin had decided that there was no reason to think that The Lord of the Rings would ever sell more than a thousand copies in the U.S., so they allowed Houghton Mifflin to import copies and sell them. Somebody was supposed to be keeping track of how many copies were imported, but somebody screwed up. The Lord of the Rings only slowly became popular, still solely in hardcover, between its publication in 1954 and 1955 and the Ace printing in 1964.

As RealityChuck said, Wollheim put out an unauthorized paperback edition in 1964 because Allen & Unwin refused to negotiate with him and he had discovered the screw-up in importation. The version I’ve heard is that Wollheim wrote Tolkien offerring to pay him royalties, but Tolkien chose to ignore the letter. In any case, Wollheim eventually paid Tolkien, and it seems that Tolkien got more money this way than he could have if the edition had been authorized, because he would have had to split the royalties with Allen & Unwin.

What I’ve heard is that it’s still in dispute whether a book whose copyright was lost because of a screw-up under the old law can have it restored under the new law. I think I’ve been told there hasn’t yet been a court case definitely settling this.

17

Quoth Cervaise:

Why, blue, of course! All the Rohirrim (or at least, the vast majority) have blond hair and blue eyes.

I tend to agree, though, that it looks like the movies are going to be as good as it would be humanly possible to make them (unless they did two movies for each volume, instead of one, but it’s only the TRUE fans who would go to see it then). It’s a real shame, though, if the Harry Potter movie doesn’t come out right… I was sort of looking forward to it.