The road goes ever on: after second breakfast I’m packing my pointy ears and sending myself to Coventry for the AGM of the Tolkien Society, where I shall be tolkien to like-minded people until the wee hours. There I shall be defending my re-design of Mallorn, the Society’s journal, and hopefully touting for copy for the next issue (copy deadline June 21, don’t be shy). See you next week.
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The End Of The Pier Show
Described by Carl Zimmer as "one of my favorite wastes of time", The End Of The Pier Show is the online scratching post of Nature Editor, Norfolk resident and sometime "garage-band monster" Henry Gee and his amazing unicycling girrafes.
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Elvish Has Left The Building
- Date:
- Saturday, 19 Apr il 2008 - 07:07 GMT
Last updated: Saturday, 19 Apr 2008 - 07:07 GMT
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Comments
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Live long and prosper! Oh, sorry, wrong pointy ears.
Do you still have those bits I wrote?
@Jeff – glad you asked me that… I seem to have mislaid them (but was afraid to ask you again). Please would you send them again? Blame my inherently entropic
tentaclestesticlestendencies – many apologies.Interesting update: at the AGM dinner the Treasurer brought as her guest Steve Vander Ark of the Harry Potter Lexicon, currently embroiled in a court battle with J. K. Rowling over the publication of a print version of this well-known online resource. Precisely why Ms Rowling has taken such action when she is believed to have used the online lexicon is beyond my simple wit and limited knowledge to
mathomfathom. The case, as they say, continues. When I mentioned that I included absolutely no Tolkien quotations in my own The Science of Middle-Earth on the advice of the publisher, Steve’s response was “Oh, you’re going to get so sued.”The guest speaker was Edmund Weiner, coauthor of the recent book The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary.
I’ve read, and even enjoyed immensely, The Ring of Words. They did include some Tolkien quotations, but I don’t suppose anyone would try to sue the OED. They might find themselves in the embarrassing situation of being on the receiving end of a counter-suit that would stop them from using any words in the English language, except for the obscure and really profane.
@Bob – Weiner’s speech was immensely enjoyable and I am looking forward to reading The Ring of Words very much. As I understand it, the Harry Potter Lexicon case revolves around fair use. By necessity, the HPL used quite a lot of HP material, even if in a different context.
As for Tolkien, one might have gotten away with a certain amount of fair use, but I decided that discretion was the best course. The Tolkien Estate is known to be litigious, and even if they do approve use of quotes, this can take some time to happen – and even then, my understanding is that they favour settings that are more scholarly than my somewhat low-rent effort. My publisher and I felt that The Science of Middle-earth, adopting a somewhat unconventional stance, might not get such approval (and even if it did, we couldn’t afford to wait for it).
Therefore I kept ‘Tolkien’ out of the title (‘Middle-earth’ was not Tolkien’s invention) and was careful even with such things as chapter headings. I even hedged the book around with the appropriate disclaimers, silver bullets, cloves of garlic and so on.
I wondered myself who is advising Ms. Rowling on this court battle. It is rarely a good idea to sue your number one fan.
My only guess is that Warner Brothers is driving this lawsuit, as they see the Lexicon as competition and they want no competition for their own book – especially if the Lexicon is better than what they are able to produce. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see WB suing fans, as we have a rather infamous recent history of artists (but more specifically corporations) suing fans who dare to infringe upon the corporate property.
A rather refreshing countertrend has been Paramount’s blessing of the fan-created Star Trek: New Voyages effort.