Obviously not the one Red Hat uses, and they've been pretty successful, doing pretty much the same thing as the company mentioned in the article (charging for free software, and implying that it's their own).
To be fair, Red Hat employs a lot of developers, and they've contributed a lot to that free software, even if they didn't write it from scratch.
Your analogy is only apt if the father was so creative as to make the house into a tourist attraction.
Not really. What if you turn one room into a home office? Now you get to make money, and the only way you are able to do that is because you were lucky enough to get a free house. And this is still ignoring the fact that living in a free house lets you avoid catching pneumonia, which is a problem for people who don't have houses. Your house might also come with a garage, which gives you someplace to park a car, while someone who can only afford to rent an apartment might not be so lucky to get a parking space -- so you get to own a car and he doesn't. Physical property has tangible advantages, and if you inherited your property, you didn't work to earn those advantages.
The original argument seemed to be that inheritance was evil because nobody should get any kind of opportunity that everybody else doesn't get. To me that seems sort of ludicrous. Life isn't fair like that. I get the idea that inheriting huge fortunes tends to create economic dynasties, and that this is sort of bad for society, but as a practical matter I simply do not see why a father should not be able to bequeath the works of his life's labor to his heirs -- whether those labors were building a house or writing books.
What I've argued in many posts in this thread is that maybe you're right and maybe you're not. The difference between Mark Twain and JRRT is that JRRT (or his estate) has lawyers who are still empowered to litigate on his behalf and Mark Twain doesn't. If someone rips you off and you do nothing, and they rip me off the exact same way and I sue, then I have some chance of seeing things settled in my favor and you have none. Life's often not fair like that.
It's a shame the way the estate treats his works as a revenue stream rather than an opus to be built upon.
Wait... so, say, Frank Herbert's Dune series as "an opus to be built upon"... this is a good thing?
Leave Tolkien's works well enough alone, I say. Christopher Tolkien's life's work has mostly been about cataloging, organizing, reconstructing, and re-presenting his father's original papers and fragments, and providing his own insights as one of the few people who were close enough to the source material to really have anything to add. If he had decided instead to pump out two or three trilogies filling in the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I wouldn't defend him at all.
You say Tolkien's estate treats his works "as a revenue stream." The other way to look at it would be that Tolkien's estate vigorously defends his original works and prevents derivative works from appearing precisely because Tolkien's work is something to be preserved and cherished, not mercilessly capitalized upon. (Christopher Tolkien himself was vocal about his skepticism that movies of The Lord of the Rings could truly preserve the intent of his father's work.)
Year after year, countless people are pounding on the doors of the Tolkien estate to make products based on JRRT's work. Should we fault the estate for only authorizing the best of them, and litigating against the rest? For an example of what happens when "derivative works" run amok, look no further than the Star Trek franchise.
If this exhibition is really going to be about "the art of videogames," I hope the curators don't give short shrift to the art on the outside of the game cabinets. It seems to have suffered a lot in recent years, but in the 80s, cabinet art was one of my favorite things about visiting arcades. And of course, pinball cabinet art can be simply amazing.
At issue is the question if an inheritor should be able to earn new money on a creation that they had nothing to do with. And not for nothing, but the original creator did not wholly invent the work themselves. They used constructs of plot and form, and often tropes and characterizations, that were not developed exclusively by themselves.. They were working off of the creation of another author themselves. We should have the opportunity to do the same.
OK, but suppose your dad isn't a writer, he's a carpenter. And suppose he builds himself a fabulous house, with his own hands. Every nail he hammers himself. This is an awesome house. And then he dies. By your logic, should your mom, you, and the rest of his offspring be allowed to live in a house that they had nothing to do with? Not only that, but your dad didn't even wholly invent the work himself -- the house sits on land, which was here long before your dad ever was. It gets power, water, and sewer from the city services -- so the house is kind of public property, really. It was OK for your dad to live in it for a while why he was alive, but when there are homeless people on the streets, why shouldn't you have to work to put a roof over your own head, the way your dad did?
Overall, I don't see how the situation you describe is even closely similar to this case - unless the author of this book uses Tolkien-related imagery or symbols prominently on cover, while advertising the book etc.
Your analogy is very bad. There is a difference between leaving your offspring the rights to a creative work they had absolutely nothing to do with and leaving them the money you made from it.
Why? Your creative work is a business, just like any other. If you had lived, you would have been able to keep operating that business, making money of the works you did in the past (and any new ones you choose to create). Why should you be able to hand your hardware store down to your heirs, but not a media business? And by your own logic, which is worse -- handing your kids a pile of money, or handing them a thriving business to operate? Are lottery winners happy? No -- generally, they piss it away and end up in debt. On the other hand, if your heirs materially participate in the business of managing your creative works (as Christopher Tolkien did while his father was alive, and continues to do long after his death), then they don't "have absolutely nothing to do with" the creative work, do they? Comments like yours just sound like sour grapes to me.
Personally, I don't see why it is unethical to capitalize on someone else's popularity, so long as the work in question has inherent creative merit
OK, ummm, total hypothetical here. Let's say you have this thing you built -- call it a widget -- and someday someone sees it and says, "Wow, that's a really amazing little gadget. I have never seen anything like it!" And it turns out this person is a TV producer, and they put you on the evening news.
All of a sudden you start getting calls about this widget you've built -- "Where can I get one?" And you reply that, gosh, you hadn't ever really thought of mass-producing them, but if enough people seem interested, maybe you will.
But one of the people who calls is an opportunist! "AHA!" he says. "If he's not going to market them, then I will." He plays the video from the TV news over and over, in slow motion, and he builds the best approximation he can of your widget. Yet because he didn't have an actual prototype to look at... his widget sucks. It's pretty much junk.
OK, so far so good. There's nothing really wrong with that. That was your missed market opportunity -- tough luck, sucker. Maybe you can still get a widget to market that works right. But here's the kicker -- the guy building the fake widgets put your name and face on the box, saying "Here is the famous widget, as invented by shutdown -p now."
Would that be ethical?
I'm not saying that analogy exactly matches what's going on in the Tolkien case, but I suspect the Tolkien Estate is looking at it something like that: The Tolkien Estate reserves the sole right to license commerical products that make use of Tolkien's name, image, and various items of "trade dress," and based on their cursory examination of Mr. Hilliard's product (a book), they feel the book's publication would be a breach of their rights.
Or you think Stalin's grandson should sue the arse off Westwood Studios for producing C&C series?
Difference there being that Stalin is a political figure (assuming we're applying the standards of U.S. law). Tolkien is not strictly a "public figure" in that sense. He was a private individual who traded on his own name to make a living, through writing books. His estate is established to preserve and protect his legacy. There's every possibility that nothing will come of the Tolkien Estate's claims in this case, I don't think we can automatically assume its claims are invalid.
Except the hardware store would need to continue to be well run.
Define "well run"? Christopher Tolkien has published some fifteen volumes of serious Tolkien scholarship, which is more books than J.R.R. himself published in his lifetime.
In my opinion, wealth should be earned, not entitled.
So if your father spends his whole life working his ass off in a coal mine to put food in his children's mouths, then dies of black lung disease when you're fourteen, his savings should all go to the state and your mom should have to go door-to-door looking for a job, huh? What is the incentive to earn wealth if you're not entitled to use it how you wish -- including making your family comfortable? Even Warren Buffett, who is not generally in favor of big inheritances, has said he will leave his children enough money to do whatever they want (just "not nothing").
No? What if it was commercials of a computer-simulated Martin Luther King, urging everyone to vote Republican?
What if it was a porno featuring Marilyn Monroe doing a "2 boys 1 cup" with Bobby and JFK? Should none of their families and loved ones have any say in the matter?
Are we ghouls, that we can exhume the bodies of the dead for whatever purpose we choose? Do historical figures have no right to their own legacy at all?
You make my point perfectly. Pause the video right at the very beginning. You'll see text at the bottom stating not only that "Gene Kelly" is a trademark, but that the images are copyright the Gene Kelly Image Trust. If Gene Kelly's estate wanted to put the kibosh on the whole project, it could have.
You could probably get away with making a picture of a can of Cock-Cola, but I guarantee you could not sell an actual can of soda with that name, especially if you modeled the trade dress after Coca-Cola. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, but whether you call it a parody or not, that can really is a can of soda, and that's what Coca-Cola's trademark protects. (And, actually, I'm sure they've filed trademarks protecting a variety of other uses.)
In the other case, yes, you could say Sarah Palin is a moron. What you could not do, though, is follow her around to all her various public appearances, observe what she orders for lunch, then publish The Sarah Palin Cookbook.
So I can make movies with a digitally-simulated model of James Dean as my lead actor, and nobody has any say in the matter? Or forget movies: TV commercials, that's where the real cash is.
They are claiming a right to manage their own publicity. I have no idea where they got the idea such a right exists, but according to the summary and TFA, that is exactly what they care claiming.
You can't market a soft drink called Cock-Cola whether you claim it's a parody or not. Also, it's pretty common these days for celebrities to trademark their own names -- Sarah Palin did it the other day. This is all so they can manage their own publicity.
You could say that about anyone who inherits his dad's hardware store. It's not as if all Christopher Tolkien has been doing has been firing off lawsuits. In all likelihood nobody would have ever seen The Silmarillion were it not for him. How different would Middle-Earth fandom be then?
Actually, your link talks about a lawsuit filed not by the Tolkien Estate, but by the companies that own the film rights to the books. That certainly seems like a stretch.
But what the lawsuit in TFA is about is the Tolkien Estate's claim that it owns publicity rights to Tolkien's name. To what extent is that true? I don't know. I mean, imagine: Say your father died a few years ago, and someone who lived up the street from you when you were a kid writes a novel in which your father is a character, and your father is portrayed as a pedophile and serial rapist. You argue that this is a complete fabrication, but the author shrugs and says, "What can I say, it's fiction. I'm exploring the ramifications for the neighborhood if your father had been a rapist. Obviously people shouldn't take this as a work of scholarship." Wouldn't you at least wish you had some recourse to stop publication of that book? Do you have recourse? Again, I don't know. Is it more ambiguous for Tolkien because he's a public figure -- or does that mean the case is more clear-cut, and that his estate has the right to control how he's portrayed in media? Would Hilliard's book really have been published if the Lord of the Rings wasn't such a hot property these days? And if not, then isn't Hilliard capitalizing on Tolkien's legacy financially? I think there are issues worth arguing here.
The Scribd document contains the text of Hilliard's court filing, but not what the Tolkien Estate said in its original cease-and-desist letter. It says it includes a copy of the Tolkien Estate's letter as Exhibit B, but there is no Exhibit B in the Scribd document. Until we can see the original language used in the cease-and-desist, it's hard to say whether there might be any valid complaint there. I get the gist of line 17 of this document, which amounts to "I can say whatever I want because of the First Amendment," but that's not strictly true, and it's usually a bad idea to go straight for the Constitution as your first line of defense. Case law could easily support the Tolkien Estate's position.
I'm sure there will be countless posts about the evils of intellectual property law, but I, for one, see no reason why this complaint and counter-complaint should not be weighed in the courts.
If you saw the Watchmen, you'd have seen that while they painted the protagonists with a dark brush, the criminals were far, far worse.
Wait... who were the criminals in Watchmen? Moloch, the guy dying of cancer? The knot-tops, a loosely-organized gang of street thugs? What makes Watchmen interesting is that there is this assumption that for there to be superheroes there must be also supervillains for them to fight...and yet criminals hardly ever figure into it. The only real "villains" are the same characters as the "heroes" -- reflecting how difficult it is to be a true "superhero" in the morally ambiguous Real World. The backdrop of fictionalized U.S. foreign policy, with an ongoing Nixon presidency and all the ambiguities of "winning" the Vietnam War, reflected this theme masterfully.
Yeah. The Comedian was especially repulsive, yet oddly compelling in his own way.
Actually, I thought one of the biggest failings of the Watchmen movie was that it managed to take the two most repulsive, yet compelling characters of the book -- the Comedian and Rorschach -- and made them simply repulsive. Watching the movie, I didn't get how anyone could possibly root for the Comedian -- but I suspect just about everyone who reads the book does, in spite of themselves. Rorschach was the same way. The way his character was unveiled over time in the book was fascinating, but in the movie I just found him dull (and that Christian Bale Batman voice was really annoying, and not, I suspect, what Alan Moore was going for).
The 'winners' where for segregation. e.g. separate countries for hobbits and all the others. The 'losers' where for integration.
That's a pretty bizarre interpretation -- all you need to do is look at the Polaroid snapshot of the Fellowship of the Ring they took at Rivendell to see that's not true.
It's a nice mental exercise, I guess, but you'd be better off applying the same kind of reasoning to, oh I dunno, The Great Gatsby or The Three Musketeers -- anything that's less unambiguous about its worldview than Tolkien.
Sauron is evil but we are told this by his enemies. Why are orcs corrupted? Because the other side said so?
I understand what you're getting at, but in this specific case, orcs are corrupted because Sauron took living beings (elves) and corrupted them. Even if you reject the word "corrupted" as used in the text and substitute the word "engineered," Sauron is at best a eugenicist. Remember also that we're talking about a world with an explicit concept of a godhead and living beings with a direct connection to it. Gandalf was called a "wizard" but he's really much closer to what you might think of as an angel. It's for these and other reasons that while this take on LotR might be cute, it doesn't really ring true.
Also, boy, the author's writing style is hard for me to swallow. Maybe it's just the translation, but the dialogue in particular does not do it for me.
Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.
Not quite accurate, since Shakespeare wrote plays and he wrote them for performance, not to for people to read. The First Folio, which is generally regarded as the first "authorized" collection of Shakespeare's works, was not published until seven years after Shakespeare was dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously not the one Red Hat uses, and they've been pretty successful, doing pretty much the same thing as the company mentioned in the article (charging for free software, and implying that it's their own).
To be fair, Red Hat employs a lot of developers, and they've contributed a lot to that free software, even if they didn't write it from scratch.
Which setting is that? I've looked in Appearance and Windows... nothing.
Your analogy is only apt if the father was so creative as to make the house into a tourist attraction.
Not really. What if you turn one room into a home office? Now you get to make money, and the only way you are able to do that is because you were lucky enough to get a free house. And this is still ignoring the fact that living in a free house lets you avoid catching pneumonia, which is a problem for people who don't have houses. Your house might also come with a garage, which gives you someplace to park a car, while someone who can only afford to rent an apartment might not be so lucky to get a parking space -- so you get to own a car and he doesn't. Physical property has tangible advantages, and if you inherited your property, you didn't work to earn those advantages.
The original argument seemed to be that inheritance was evil because nobody should get any kind of opportunity that everybody else doesn't get. To me that seems sort of ludicrous. Life isn't fair like that. I get the idea that inheriting huge fortunes tends to create economic dynasties, and that this is sort of bad for society, but as a practical matter I simply do not see why a father should not be able to bequeath the works of his life's labor to his heirs -- whether those labors were building a house or writing books.
Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain is a public figure.
What I've argued in many posts in this thread is that maybe you're right and maybe you're not. The difference between Mark Twain and JRRT is that JRRT (or his estate) has lawyers who are still empowered to litigate on his behalf and Mark Twain doesn't. If someone rips you off and you do nothing, and they rip me off the exact same way and I sue, then I have some chance of seeing things settled in my favor and you have none. Life's often not fair like that.
It's a shame the way the estate treats his works as a revenue stream rather than an opus to be built upon.
Wait... so, say, Frank Herbert's Dune series as "an opus to be built upon"... this is a good thing?
Leave Tolkien's works well enough alone, I say. Christopher Tolkien's life's work has mostly been about cataloging, organizing, reconstructing, and re-presenting his father's original papers and fragments, and providing his own insights as one of the few people who were close enough to the source material to really have anything to add. If he had decided instead to pump out two or three trilogies filling in the years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I wouldn't defend him at all.
You say Tolkien's estate treats his works "as a revenue stream." The other way to look at it would be that Tolkien's estate vigorously defends his original works and prevents derivative works from appearing precisely because Tolkien's work is something to be preserved and cherished, not mercilessly capitalized upon. (Christopher Tolkien himself was vocal about his skepticism that movies of The Lord of the Rings could truly preserve the intent of his father's work.)
Year after year, countless people are pounding on the doors of the Tolkien estate to make products based on JRRT's work. Should we fault the estate for only authorizing the best of them, and litigating against the rest? For an example of what happens when "derivative works" run amok, look no further than the Star Trek franchise.
If this exhibition is really going to be about "the art of videogames," I hope the curators don't give short shrift to the art on the outside of the game cabinets. It seems to have suffered a lot in recent years, but in the 80s, cabinet art was one of my favorite things about visiting arcades. And of course, pinball cabinet art can be simply amazing.
At issue is the question if an inheritor should be able to earn new money on a creation that they had nothing to do with. And not for nothing, but the original creator did not wholly invent the work themselves. They used constructs of plot and form, and often tropes and characterizations, that were not developed exclusively by themselves.. They were working off of the creation of another author themselves. We should have the opportunity to do the same.
OK, but suppose your dad isn't a writer, he's a carpenter. And suppose he builds himself a fabulous house, with his own hands. Every nail he hammers himself. This is an awesome house. And then he dies. By your logic, should your mom, you, and the rest of his offspring be allowed to live in a house that they had nothing to do with? Not only that, but your dad didn't even wholly invent the work himself -- the house sits on land, which was here long before your dad ever was. It gets power, water, and sewer from the city services -- so the house is kind of public property, really. It was OK for your dad to live in it for a while why he was alive, but when there are homeless people on the streets, why shouldn't you have to work to put a roof over your own head, the way your dad did?
Overall, I don't see how the situation you describe is even closely similar to this case - unless the author of this book uses Tolkien-related imagery or symbols prominently on cover, while advertising the book etc.
Check TFA -- that's what they're claiming.
Your analogy is very bad. There is a difference between leaving your offspring the rights to a creative work they had absolutely nothing to do with and leaving them the money you made from it.
Why? Your creative work is a business, just like any other. If you had lived, you would have been able to keep operating that business, making money of the works you did in the past (and any new ones you choose to create). Why should you be able to hand your hardware store down to your heirs, but not a media business? And by your own logic, which is worse -- handing your kids a pile of money, or handing them a thriving business to operate? Are lottery winners happy? No -- generally, they piss it away and end up in debt. On the other hand, if your heirs materially participate in the business of managing your creative works (as Christopher Tolkien did while his father was alive, and continues to do long after his death), then they don't "have absolutely nothing to do with" the creative work, do they? Comments like yours just sound like sour grapes to me.
Personally, I don't see why it is unethical to capitalize on someone else's popularity, so long as the work in question has inherent creative merit
OK, ummm, total hypothetical here. Let's say you have this thing you built -- call it a widget -- and someday someone sees it and says, "Wow, that's a really amazing little gadget. I have never seen anything like it!" And it turns out this person is a TV producer, and they put you on the evening news.
All of a sudden you start getting calls about this widget you've built -- "Where can I get one?" And you reply that, gosh, you hadn't ever really thought of mass-producing them, but if enough people seem interested, maybe you will.
But one of the people who calls is an opportunist! "AHA!" he says. "If he's not going to market them, then I will." He plays the video from the TV news over and over, in slow motion, and he builds the best approximation he can of your widget. Yet because he didn't have an actual prototype to look at ... his widget sucks. It's pretty much junk.
OK, so far so good. There's nothing really wrong with that. That was your missed market opportunity -- tough luck, sucker. Maybe you can still get a widget to market that works right. But here's the kicker -- the guy building the fake widgets put your name and face on the box, saying "Here is the famous widget, as invented by shutdown -p now."
Would that be ethical?
I'm not saying that analogy exactly matches what's going on in the Tolkien case, but I suspect the Tolkien Estate is looking at it something like that: The Tolkien Estate reserves the sole right to license commerical products that make use of Tolkien's name, image, and various items of "trade dress," and based on their cursory examination of Mr. Hilliard's product (a book), they feel the book's publication would be a breach of their rights.
Or you think Stalin's grandson should sue the arse off Westwood Studios for producing C&C series?
Difference there being that Stalin is a political figure (assuming we're applying the standards of U.S. law). Tolkien is not strictly a "public figure" in that sense. He was a private individual who traded on his own name to make a living, through writing books. His estate is established to preserve and protect his legacy. There's every possibility that nothing will come of the Tolkien Estate's claims in this case, I don't think we can automatically assume its claims are invalid.
Except the hardware store would need to continue to be well run.
Define "well run"? Christopher Tolkien has published some fifteen volumes of serious Tolkien scholarship, which is more books than J.R.R. himself published in his lifetime.
In my opinion, wealth should be earned, not entitled.
So if your father spends his whole life working his ass off in a coal mine to put food in his children's mouths, then dies of black lung disease when you're fourteen, his savings should all go to the state and your mom should have to go door-to-door looking for a job, huh? What is the incentive to earn wealth if you're not entitled to use it how you wish -- including making your family comfortable? Even Warren Buffett, who is not generally in favor of big inheritances, has said he will leave his children enough money to do whatever they want (just "not nothing").
He is dead, he cannot be harmed by your actions.
No? What if it was commercials of a computer-simulated Martin Luther King, urging everyone to vote Republican?
What if it was a porno featuring Marilyn Monroe doing a "2 boys 1 cup" with Bobby and JFK? Should none of their families and loved ones have any say in the matter?
Are we ghouls, that we can exhume the bodies of the dead for whatever purpose we choose? Do historical figures have no right to their own legacy at all?
You make my point perfectly. Pause the video right at the very beginning. You'll see text at the bottom stating not only that "Gene Kelly" is a trademark, but that the images are copyright the Gene Kelly Image Trust. If Gene Kelly's estate wanted to put the kibosh on the whole project, it could have.
You could probably get away with making a picture of a can of Cock-Cola, but I guarantee you could not sell an actual can of soda with that name, especially if you modeled the trade dress after Coca-Cola. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, but whether you call it a parody or not, that can really is a can of soda, and that's what Coca-Cola's trademark protects. (And, actually, I'm sure they've filed trademarks protecting a variety of other uses.)
In the other case, yes, you could say Sarah Palin is a moron. What you could not do, though, is follow her around to all her various public appearances, observe what she orders for lunch, then publish The Sarah Palin Cookbook.
So I can make movies with a digitally-simulated model of James Dean as my lead actor, and nobody has any say in the matter? Or forget movies: TV commercials, that's where the real cash is.
They are claiming a right to manage their own publicity. I have no idea where they got the idea such a right exists, but according to the summary and TFA, that is exactly what they care claiming.
You can't market a soft drink called Cock-Cola whether you claim it's a parody or not. Also, it's pretty common these days for celebrities to trademark their own names -- Sarah Palin did it the other day. This is all so they can manage their own publicity.
You could say that about anyone who inherits his dad's hardware store. It's not as if all Christopher Tolkien has been doing has been firing off lawsuits. In all likelihood nobody would have ever seen The Silmarillion were it not for him. How different would Middle-Earth fandom be then?
Actually, your link talks about a lawsuit filed not by the Tolkien Estate, but by the companies that own the film rights to the books. That certainly seems like a stretch.
But what the lawsuit in TFA is about is the Tolkien Estate's claim that it owns publicity rights to Tolkien's name. To what extent is that true? I don't know. I mean, imagine: Say your father died a few years ago, and someone who lived up the street from you when you were a kid writes a novel in which your father is a character, and your father is portrayed as a pedophile and serial rapist. You argue that this is a complete fabrication, but the author shrugs and says, "What can I say, it's fiction. I'm exploring the ramifications for the neighborhood if your father had been a rapist. Obviously people shouldn't take this as a work of scholarship." Wouldn't you at least wish you had some recourse to stop publication of that book? Do you have recourse? Again, I don't know. Is it more ambiguous for Tolkien because he's a public figure -- or does that mean the case is more clear-cut, and that his estate has the right to control how he's portrayed in media? Would Hilliard's book really have been published if the Lord of the Rings wasn't such a hot property these days? And if not, then isn't Hilliard capitalizing on Tolkien's legacy financially? I think there are issues worth arguing here.
The Scribd document contains the text of Hilliard's court filing, but not what the Tolkien Estate said in its original cease-and-desist letter. It says it includes a copy of the Tolkien Estate's letter as Exhibit B, but there is no Exhibit B in the Scribd document. Until we can see the original language used in the cease-and-desist, it's hard to say whether there might be any valid complaint there. I get the gist of line 17 of this document, which amounts to "I can say whatever I want because of the First Amendment," but that's not strictly true, and it's usually a bad idea to go straight for the Constitution as your first line of defense. Case law could easily support the Tolkien Estate's position.
I'm sure there will be countless posts about the evils of intellectual property law, but I, for one, see no reason why this complaint and counter-complaint should not be weighed in the courts.
If you saw the Watchmen, you'd have seen that while they painted the protagonists with a dark brush, the criminals were far, far worse.
Wait ... who were the criminals in Watchmen? Moloch, the guy dying of cancer? The knot-tops, a loosely-organized gang of street thugs? What makes Watchmen interesting is that there is this assumption that for there to be superheroes there must be also supervillains for them to fight ...and yet criminals hardly ever figure into it. The only real "villains" are the same characters as the "heroes" -- reflecting how difficult it is to be a true "superhero" in the morally ambiguous Real World. The backdrop of fictionalized U.S. foreign policy, with an ongoing Nixon presidency and all the ambiguities of "winning" the Vietnam War, reflected this theme masterfully.
Yeah. The Comedian was especially repulsive, yet oddly compelling in his own way.
Actually, I thought one of the biggest failings of the Watchmen movie was that it managed to take the two most repulsive, yet compelling characters of the book -- the Comedian and Rorschach -- and made them simply repulsive. Watching the movie, I didn't get how anyone could possibly root for the Comedian -- but I suspect just about everyone who reads the book does, in spite of themselves. Rorschach was the same way. The way his character was unveiled over time in the book was fascinating, but in the movie I just found him dull (and that Christian Bale Batman voice was really annoying, and not, I suspect, what Alan Moore was going for).
The 'winners' where for segregation. e.g. separate countries for hobbits and all the others.
The 'losers' where for integration.
That's a pretty bizarre interpretation -- all you need to do is look at the Polaroid snapshot of the Fellowship of the Ring they took at Rivendell to see that's not true.
It's a nice mental exercise, I guess, but you'd be better off applying the same kind of reasoning to, oh I dunno, The Great Gatsby or The Three Musketeers -- anything that's less unambiguous about its worldview than Tolkien.
Sauron is evil but we are told this by his enemies. Why are orcs corrupted? Because the other side said so?
I understand what you're getting at, but in this specific case, orcs are corrupted because Sauron took living beings (elves) and corrupted them. Even if you reject the word "corrupted" as used in the text and substitute the word "engineered," Sauron is at best a eugenicist. Remember also that we're talking about a world with an explicit concept of a godhead and living beings with a direct connection to it. Gandalf was called a "wizard" but he's really much closer to what you might think of as an angel. It's for these and other reasons that while this take on LotR might be cute, it doesn't really ring true.
Also, boy, the author's writing style is hard for me to swallow. Maybe it's just the translation, but the dialogue in particular does not do it for me.
Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.
Not quite accurate, since Shakespeare wrote plays and he wrote them for performance, not to for people to read. The First Folio, which is generally regarded as the first "authorized" collection of Shakespeare's works, was not published until seven years after Shakespeare was dead.