LotR Rewritten From a Mordor Perspective

Hugh Pickens writes writes "It's been said that history is written by the winners but Laura Miller writes in Salon about a counterexample as she reviews a new version of Lord of the Rings. The Last Ring-bearer was published to acclaim in Russia by Kirill Yeskov, a paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life. Yeskov performs essentially the same feat in his book. The Last Ring-bearer is set during and after the end of the War of the Ring and told from the perspective of the losers. In Yeskov's retelling, available in translation as a free download, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science 'destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men' and Aragorn is depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen. Sauron's citadel Barad-dur is, by contrast, described as 'that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.'"

Great book

[KiloByte]

It's a great book, I've read it ten years ago, in the Polish translation.

Quoting Wikipedia: "fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English". Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?

Re:Great book

[giuseppemag]

It is published in English for free, and so far no litigations have happened. In this copyright is simply stopping this guy from taking *commercial* advantage of the huge amount of work done in creating the setting for his story.

This said, if they decide to go after this book after all then they should be hanged by their testicles...

Re:Great book

[snaggen]

exactly! Without copyright nothing of any quality would ever be written. It would all just be the cheap amateurish crap like shakespear and mozart. Thank god for copyright so we can enjoy good culture like die hard 4 and Britney Spears.

Re:Great book

[bunratty]

I would have to agree that the copyright and patent systems could be better. But abolishing them altogether could be disastrous. They do serve a purpose.

Perhaps the car analogy is that thousands are killed by cars every year, but abolishing cars could be a disaster. Just because you can think of a disadvantage of something doesn't mean it's all bad and should be abolished. Too many times what I say is reduced to "X is all good" or "X is all bad". There are tradeoffs. Life isn't black and white.

Re:Sounds about right

[varcher]

That's the classical fantasy/SF duality.

Quick-n-dirty how-to distinguish fantasy from science-fiction: It's not about elves vs spaceships. It's about conservatism vs progressivism.

A fantasy book is about preserving/restoring/keeping the old order. Calamity befalls, and it's up to the heroes to repair the world. The tyrant has obtained absolute power, and your task is to topple it and restore the rightful ruler(s). The gods are angry because the people have strayed from the "path" and things go suddendly to hell.

The sci-fi book is transformative. Change happens, and the world progresses. The old ways are discarded, the new ways begins (with their usual lot of gut-wrenching change) and life is transformed.

(and then, you have modern hi-tech thrillers, in which big change happens, except it has no lasting consequences whatsoever. But that's a different topic)

So, intrinsically, the Ring War in which Frodo and his merry band wins is fantasy. The Ring War in which Mordor wins would have been sci-fi.

Re:Great book

[commodore6502]

>>>If there was no copyright, then everyone could simply copy the works of authors and they may not end up being paid for their work.

They aren't paid now.
Numerous authors have to sue RIAA or MPAA-affiliated companies, just to get paid. Example: The corporation that made Lord of the Rings claimed "we made no profit" and paid the director, scriptwriter, actors, and Tolkien's family nothing. Ditto Titanic and Avatar and Forrest Gump and.....

So explain again how copyright is "good"? These authors would be better off sticking a Paypal button in their books & asking for donations - they'd make more money than the lying asshat corporations pay them.

Re:Great book

[Jason Levine]

I agree. Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 and 1955. According to current copyright law (assuming no extensions are passed, which is a huge assumption), the copyright will end in 2049/2050. It's been under copyright for about 56 years already and still has about 39 to go. I know the Tolkien estate profits off of Lord of the Rings, but I don't see how that encourages new works. Yes, we got the LoTR movies, but those could have been made if LoTR passed into the public domain. The only people who would lose out would be the children/grandchildren of JRR Tolkien.

Of course, even worse is Gone With The Wind. It was published in 1936 and is still considered to be under copyright protection 75 years later. We need to wait until 2031 until it enters the Public Domain. Meanwhile, the author, Margaret Mitchell, has been dead for 62 years. Her children (if she had any, I can't find any reference to kids) would be grown up by now with grandkids of their own. Copyright was not intended to be a paycheck for your great-grandkids.

A fair copyright term would be 20 years plus a one time 20 year renewal. (And I'm being generous as I think the ideal would be 14/14.) Under this, Lord of the Rings would have passed into the public domain in 1994/1995. In fact, under this copyright term length, anything published before 1971 would be in the public domain. How many works published prior to 1971 create substantial income for their authors (or their estates)? How many languish in obscurity because no publishing house wants to re-release them and small presses can't secure the rights to print them? How many derivative works could be made from stories that are over 40 years old (thus bringing the originals back into the public light)?

Re:Banewreaker

[ShakaUVM]

>>The WW2 allies were hardly virtuous, what with fire-bombing of innocent civilians

It's not that simple.

Hamburg, for example, was partly in retaliation for Coventry earlier in the war. But Hitler only took the gloves off and started targeting civilians after the RAF started dropping bombs on German civilians. Why did the RAF target civilians, when the (evil) Nazis were refraining? Because the Luftwaffe had radar navigation, but the RAF thought they had the skill to astronavigate accurately enough to put bombs onto military targets. They didn't.

Then you could get into the whole Battle of the Beams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams), and whether it was ethical to redirect German bombers onto English farmhouses...

>>throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents

I don't think you know what the words "death camps" actually mean.

Re:Great book

[Kokuyo]

Whenever someone says that without copyright, nothing of value would be created anymore, I just have to think back to Pablo Picasso and all the riches he amassed through his art. After all, without copyright, everyone could have copied him and thus taken away his well deserved reward without which he would never have painted in the first place.

Oh wait...

Re:Sounds about right

[sourcerror]

Set against that on the sci-fi side, Star Wars fits perfectly into your description of fantasy.

A lot of people think (me included) that Star Wars is fantasy.

Re:Great book

[bunratty]

Mozart's works were generally commissioned by the wealthy. Without copyright, we'd likely go back to a patronage [wikipedia.org] system, and as a result we'd have significantly fewer books and movies. We'd have theater and music, because actors and musicians could charge audiences to see shows. We'd likely have television because broadcasters could keep shows from being copied until they were shown with ads. Books and movies, however, could be copied and distributed without money going back to the people who produced them.

Re:Sounds about right

[Nimey]

Wrong. The difference between SF and Fantasy is that SF *could* happen - its setting high tech. Fantasy *can't* happen - its setting requires magic of some sort.

Why do some people have to inject their politics into everything?

Re:Banewreaker

[Nimey]

So, commodore64_love, why the new account?

Re:Great book

[mike2R]

The point (and yes I am just parroting Lessig here) was that the Statute of Anne was the replacement for the old common law copyrights which were perpetual. The point of the Statute of Anne was to stop copyrights being perpetual in English law. That said there were none of the implications for derivative works that we have today. I'm pretty sure that while the owner of the copyright had the perpetual right to be the only one who could print copies of Shakespear's plays, anyone could perform them without licence: it was literally the right to make copies.

Re:Great book

[vadim_t]

The original owner of a work may be dead, but the franchise lives on. Shouldn't the franchise holders be protected from losing their investment to copy-cats?

Why should they be? My idea is simply reducing the length. It would be simply the question of planning to make a profit within 14-30 years. And if you can't make a profit in 14 years they'll probably never make it, anyway.

If George Lucas died today, should Star Wars immediately become public domain, even when there's a huge MMO and lots of movie memorabilia with full licensing and lots of money still to be made by the people who paid for the right to do so?

No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.

Copyright should be much shorter, but it should last the same whether the creator lives or dies.

Re:Parent - Not A Troll

[bunratty]

Because people who like to download free music and movies make themselves feel comfortable by demonizing the industry they are ripping off to make themselves feel better. It's called cognitive dissonance [wikipedia.org]. Accepting my explanation as valid would lead to uncomfortable feelings, so you'll see many posters make lame arguments about my very simple and valid explanation. You can see it all the time in arguments against evolution and anthropogenic global warming and other science that people don't want to believe.

Re:Sounds about right

[amnesia_tc]

And any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So fantasy is actually the most sci-fi.

Re:Great book

[quenda]

just say "when you've made 5M bucks off your book, it's off copyright"?

I don't know about books, but for movies that would equate to perpetual copyright [wikipedia.org]

Re:Great book

[cpt kangarooski]

How about just making it annual up to some maximum?

If a copyright holder is only interested in copyright for, say, 3 years, and is so uninterested after that point that he can't even summon up the energy to deliberately release the work to the public domain (but wouldn't care if it did enter), you're still giving him 7-12 years for no good reason.

Given that most of the economic value (and copyright is about nothing other than economic value) is realized very quickly upon publication in any given medium, most works don't need long copyrights. (E.g. a daily newspaper is fishwrap by the end of the day, a book has maybe 18 months, there being nowhere to go after a release in paperback, and movies are little more than movies of the week after 10, maybe 15 years.)

It's really rare to have a work of long-lasting value, and we may as well design the system around the majority of works, rather than the rare, successful outliers. And the guys with the long-lived works can surely afford the more frequent renewal schedule.

Re:Great book

[cpt kangarooski]

No.

Which is not to say that copyright should be based around the life of the author. It should be a term of years from publication or some other fixed point in time. This makes it predictable, which is good for everyone.

But copyright isn't intended to benefit authors or people who made deals with authors. It is intended to benefit the public. The value to authors is just a means to an end; we give them a monopoly in order to encourage them to create things that will enter the public domain, and if the work is popular, the monopoly is worth something for them to exploit.

Ideally then, we should grant the bare minimum copyright necessary in order to get works created. Less would not be as beneficial as possible to the public, more would be superfluous and wasteful. This may not be possible on a work-by-work basis, but we can probably work out some good average numbers.

That the work is still popular by the time the copyright runs out is no justification for granting a longer term. And why should the public only get to enjoy worthless works freely anyway?

Tolkein is dead

[Quila]

He can't write any more. No amount of compensation will convince Tolkein to do anymore work.

So why should the copyright still exist on his work?

Re:Great book

[Myopic]

You have made a moral argument for copyright, which I reject. I don't pay the workmen who built my house each year that I live in it; General Motors didn't get a cut when I bought my used Jeep Liberty vehicle; I don't pay the Ginsu company a royalty every time I cut meat with its knives -- and I reject a moral argument that I "should" do so in any of those cases. For intellectual works, I feel similarly. I get up every morning and make my money by performing my craft, which is software programming, which is just like almost everybody makes their money, for performances.

The arguments in favor of copyright which I accept are practical arguments. I want the best ongoing media creation I can have, and I support whatever laws help me get it. Some intellectual property doesn't lend itself to performance-style income, such as long-term-use-with-no-support software, or literary novels, or blockbuster movies. Because I like software, novels and movies, I support laws that help me get those things.

The question, then, is not what do we "owe" the authors (answer: nothing) but rather what system do we need to encourage them. Do we need copyrights that last longer than two human lifetimes? I don't think we do. Do we need copyrights that preclude derivative works? I don't think we do. How about preventing collage and sampling? I don't think so. I think we can have all the benefits of copyright, and much less of the drawbacks, if we change the balances in the copyright system.