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How about one of us directly email the estate and ask what they mean by "publish"?

I would probably reserve judgement about this FAQ until they start sending C&Ds to Stephen Colbert for nerding out on his show, or, again, Gimli/Legolas smut writers on AO3. This is a matter for OTW to handle right now and we’ll see where they get with it.

Doujinshi are overlooked under Japanese copyright law because they don’t compete in the same market as the original, and they don’t infringe on the profits of the original.

Also, it’s highly unlikely some amateur Japanese fanartist will ping the radar of a big estate in a different country. Not to mention the difficulty the estate will have in proving the artist is copying Tolkien’s images or material especially when most doujins have distinct art styles from the original, and the writing is likely to be in a different language.

Even assuming the Tolkien Estate does have the legal right to just ban all new works that approach any of the properties they own, I think that playing by their rules is both ridiculous and dangerous.

Fan works as a whole are not copyright infringement. They're inspired art made by passionate people who want to share their contributions with the world. A ban this broad is not just a canon quarantine; it's an attempt to police all discussion of a hugely influential piece of culture and prohibit all engagement with it outside of watching the movies or reading the books (i.e. paying for it).

I am of the opinion that all works draw inspiration from other things that came before. If the Tolkien Estate wants to limit that creation, then I will oppose it. By extension, if the community chooses to block off the most influential continuum to fandom outside of Star Trek because a trust went on a power trip, then I will consider leaving. (Big whoop from someone who hasn't officially contributed anything, but it's true.)

I apologize for making this seem like a mountain if it is truly a molehill. I did particapate (a little) in the Discord dicussion and carried my interpretation over to the Board. So I apologize, again, for that.

Again, my words on the subject of Tolkien materials should be taken with a grain of salt since I haven't read LOTR and barely remember The Hobbit.

-kA

(Also not meaning to sound mad or belittling, sorry if it comes off as such.)

Which I think at least in US law means a fic freely accessible on a place like AO3 would still be protected by fair use for the purposes of parody. But IANAL. This FAQ just reads like a standard “well of course you can’t publish your own version of LotR to make money” thing which you would sorta expect from big copyright holders like The Mouse Corporation — we know they’re very litigious and yet that hasn’t quarantined the MCU from missions.

To be honest, I’m not sure why people would expect the Tolkien estate to say ‘sure you can publish stuff set in our sandbox’? That statement is to deter people from publishing books for sale using stuff from M-e, not fanfic writers on AO3.

(Sorry if that sounds patronising. I don’t mean to make it sound like that, I just think this is a bit mountain out of molehill-ing the situation. Unless Tolkien Estate is rolling out C&Ds to everyone who’s ever written Gimli/Legolas smut or something, we really shouldn’t worry too much about it.)

Our quarantine list has always been about respecting the feelings of authors. Authors, of course, being a subset of people.

But now that Tolkien's immediate family are all gone, this "estate" somehow thinks it has the right to control content in a way that the actual Tolkiens never attempted. And this "estate" didn't put a single muscle's flex of effort into producing the Middle-earth legendarium. And, of course, an "estate" is a legal entity, not a person. I do not respect the feelings of legal entities.

So in this instance, I'm pushing that the legendarium not be added to our quarantine list as usual. I will, of course, respect community guidelines if quarantining the continuum is what the community ends up doing, but I don't feel we're under the usual respect-based obligation to do so in this instance.

—doctorlit feels that intellectual properties ought to enter the public domain much, much faster

... I figured I would try to pre-empt that here, even though I am not a lawyer.

In the U.S., it's pretty clear that the Tolkien Estate has no right to do this, or at least their right to do so is very limited. They'd have to fight individual authors and prove that their fan work is likely to satisfy people who would otherwise have bought LotR stuff, which is very hard to prove. A fanfic is not likely to use the name of Tolkien's books because the intended audience wants to see something new. Only the worst Suefics outright plagiarize the lines and descriptions in the books. Fanfic is generally free, so copyright holders are never directly harmed by fanfic unless the fic in question was privately commissioned. If they want to go for sites that host content like FFN, AO3, DeviantArt, and others, they'll have to deal with safe harbor rules, which (broadly) say that sites are not legally responsible for the content users post.

You might as well claim that all fantasy is owned by the Tolkien Estate because LotR codified the tropes and language that define the genre. This, obviously, is a ridiculous argument with no merit.

As for the PPC, what we do is parody a derivative of a copyrighted work using our own fictional world and framework. What we do is so far removed from the copyright holder, I can't even fathom us getting in legal trouble for making a mission. Even for those of us who made OCs from Middle-earth, those characters and their experiences are owned by us.

Here is the link.

In case you can't visit the link, below is the secotion in question:

Can I publish fan fiction or other books or material based on Tolkien’s works?

The Tolkien Estate has a duty to protect the integrity of Tolkien’s original writings and artworks and takes copyright very seriously. This means that you cannot copy any part of Tolkien’s writings or images, nor can you create materials which refer to the characters, stories, places, events or other elements contained in any of Tolkien’s works.

(Emphasis mine)

The FAQ is vague and means several things (including names written in Elvish, by the looks of it) are now illegal (I think? Andaccording to this, anyways), most notably TOS.

I have no real say in this, not knowing Tolkien's works real well, so I'll stay out of the conversation from here on out.

Disclaimer: I am not a laywer. I am basing what I've written from what I know and have interpreted. Please do not take my word as legal advice.

-kA

(Edit: tagged as Serious Buisness)

Uh, we talked about this in the Lounge. I honestly don’t know what to say about it personally.

Link to the announcement thing: https://href.li/?https://www.tolkienestate.com/frequently-asked-questions-and-links/?fbclid=IwAR3oyGPRKgf1sE3B9D_3e1WtVJaYV0yZHConYXedDJY79tDy8SKmYetqrY4

Here!

No warnings, just insanity. Medic is a free-to-use character!

(Also, this is a. not my current writing style and b. takes place in April 2021.)

The fic is Mermaids?!

It may be short, but there are surprising goodies inside, including but not limited to a new RC for Urato and Inasuke. Mission set shortly after New Year.

P.S: I have made a request to adopt Booky the Normal-Sized Temmie earlier, but there was no reply. If the request is denied, I will edit out the mention.

Trade Routes (also on Google Docs, in which Aulhar Tauran gets lost and ends up joining the Acquisitions Division of the Department of Finance.

I hope people like this exploration of a side of HQ that doesn't see too much screen time.

I somehow found a hotel downtown that was "pricy" as opposed to "oh dear lord why does anyone pay these rates??" so ... I'm in!

I was just thinking about the need to delineate crossover missions if we're looking to put all missions in chronological order. So maintaining the old notation could help make that separation while still letting people see a linear(ish) progression of missions in a given continuum?

Agent Blaze and Agent Noman, reporting for duty!

I might've gotten a little carried away in terms of length, this is ten whole pages!

I mean, we aren't listing all continua on continuum pages, since presumably you already know these are HP missions if you're on the HP canon or character page, but yeah, additional continua are noted. It would certainly be possible to scroll or search down a page for the text "crossover with" and find missions with that annotation.

(For the record, on non-continuum pages, any major crossed-over canons should be noted as "Canon A x Canon B", etc. Note x, not /. A little x denotes a crossover, a / denotes a pairing. So far, I haven't seen any fic slashing whole canons, and I never want to. {; P )

~Neshomeh

We could link the mission to both continuum pages and mention its crossover status somewhere in its entry. It'd help delineate crossovers from one-fandom missions, but still keep everything in chrono order.

Yes, everything in chronological order, excellent, this is what a doctorlit likes! I do see some value in having a separate crossover section buuuuuut chronological reading order go brrrrrrrr. : )

And "this" is most certainly a pronoun, and should be capitalized in titles, as shown by Mr. Hinton.

—doctorlit is totally going to read that novel at some point too

Keeping crossovers split out might still be good? Not sure.

Continuing on the topic of how people use the wiki to find missions, I've been thinking for a long time that I'd like to dispense with the current organization of "Missions in This Continuum" in three sub-headings of "Agents Specialized in This Continuum," "Agents Not Yet Specialized in This Continuum," and "Crossovers." For example, see the current Harry Potter page.

I don't care for this because it creates redundancy: missions to crossover fics and missions that are crossovers between spin-offs end up listed twice, and a spin-off crossover mission to a crossover fic is listed three times. It's kinda bonkers.

I'd rather put missions in HQ Standard Timeline order, as I've done with "Missions Featuring This Character" sections—e.g., on the Harry Potter (character) page.

Even before this thread, I figured if people wanted to read missions featuring a particular agent, they could look up that agent to find all their stuff, and as of this thread it doesn't seem like that's a major way people find missions, anyway.

As for missions to crossovers, there's a page of the Killed Badfic list for that. If there's an interest in seeing this organized by continuum in some fashion, we might be able to work out a good way to do that, but I think that's a separate conversation?

What do you think? Please let me know!

~Neshomeh

P.S. "This" is a pronoun, right? It should be capitalized in titles, right? I keep second-guessing it.