A story of genuinely remarkable stupidity:
A Lord of the Rings fanfiction writer has lost a copyright lawsuit over the publication of his own sequel to the much-loved series after opening up a counterproductive legal battle against JRR Tolkien’s estate.
The US-based author Demetrious Polychron published what he described as the “pitch-perfect” Lord of the Rings follow-up in 2022, titled The Fellowship of the King. He planned for the book to be the first of a seven-part series inspired by the franchise.
But the following April, Polychron attempted to sue the Tolkien estate and Amazon over the spin-off TV series The Rings of Power, which he claimed infringed the copyright in his book. A California court dismissed the case after the judge ruled that Polychron’s text was, in fact, infringing on Amazon’s prequel, released in September 2022.
The Tolkien estate then filed a separate lawsuit against Polychron for all physical and digital copies of The Fellowship of the King to be destroyed, as well as a permanent injunction to prevent any of the fanfiction series from being further distributed.
The US court also awarded lawyers’ fees totalling $134,000 (£106,000) to the Tolkien estate and Amazon in connection with Polychron’s lawsuit.
Making the order, Judge Wilson referred to Polychron’s original claim for copyright protection as “unreasonable” and “frivolous” given that his work is entirely based on characters in The Lord of the Rings.
This piece offers a bit more information, noting that Polychron’s book is a sequel to Tolkien’s story… which is slightly but immediately problematic when you’re claiming that Rings of Power was ripping you off, cos the latter was notably a PREQUEL to LotR. Seems that one of his gripes was the series including a character called Elanor who was OBVIOUSLY ripped off from his character of that name… but his Elanor is TOLKIEN’s Elanor, the child of Sam Gamgee. She appears right at the very end of Return of the King. He was basically going to sue Amazon and Tolkien’s estate for using characters and character names that he’d knocked off from Tolkien himself. It’d be like Brian Lumley suing H.P. Lovecraft for using Cthulhu. What a fuckwit, he deserves whatever he gets… admittedly I’m not sure how you destroy all digital copies of something, but that’ll be Polychron’s problem, not mine.
