The JRR Tolkien Estate Can Go Fuck Itself | Hacker News Reader

The JRR Tolkien Estate Can Go Fuck Itself

giro.org

58 pointsjancona31 comments

In general, the $FAMOUS_DEAD_AUTHOR estate can go fuck itself; such things usually exist for rent-seeking and nothing else. This is especially egregious, though, and there's probably a law against making baseless trademark threats in bad faith. Which the Tolkien estate can ignore with impunity because the legal system is scary for most people, and always inconvenient.

In happier news, though, copies of the banned buttons are now on sale from someone else. The Streisand effect works.

The best comment on that post is this by AngusM:

---

“Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know … and they guard the plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed, they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of current market value; and they can’t make a thing for themselves …” ["The Hobbit", J.R.R. Tolkien]

After registering thehobbitmovies.com I received a not too friendly letter from the Tolkien estate instructing me to hand over the domain.

I declined their request and may put a site up at some point. For now it is a reminder that it is easy for people to tell you do something they do not have a right to tell you.

I guess we're still not Reddit as long as "fuck" is not all caps.

It's the title of the original post, not editorializing for HN.

What he should do is file a DMCA counter-notification, which would require Zazzle to restore the product unless the Tolkien estate files suit within 10 days:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html

The DMCA doesn't apply to trademark infringement claims.

Ah, ok. Maybe it's possible to file a fair use counterclaim then?

Yes, but this does:

US Code Title 15 Section 1125:

(3) Exclusions

The following shall not be actionable as dilution by blurring or dilution by tarnishment under this subsection:

(A) Any fair use, including a nominative or descriptive fair use, or facilitation of such fair use, of a famous mark by another person other than as a designation of source for the person’s own goods or services, including use in connection with—

(i) advertising or promotion that permits consumers to compare goods or services; or

(ii) identifying and parodying, criticizing, or commenting upon the famous mark owner or the goods or services of the famous mark owner.

You can (if Zazzle will let you) just ignore them.

They have no case.

That merely outlines the problem with Zazzle. They not only respond to DMCA notices by taking down the offended materials (just like an ISP), but they also preemptively police the environment by themselves and take down anything they suspect is copyright infringement.

I once made a t-shirt with an old Albert Einstein picture and they immediately took it down, asking me if I had the permission to reproduce this image. I had to send them a link to The Library of Congress page where I downloaded the image, pointing out that this picture belongs to the public domain. They can ignore a lot of stuff but they won't.

That's interesting; because I think I recall something in the language of the safe harbor law where if a content hoster starts actively policing their own content, they can be held liable for anything that slips through their net.

Honest question: does the Tolkien Estate have any legal grounding here ?

The way I look at it, if there was legal grounding, it might be a little quirky, as technically we won't be able to even mention any copyrighted/trademarked brand in casual texts. Imagine reviewing products and getting a take down notice at the end of that ? Doesn't make sense to me.

My reaction is: So?

As a fan of both Tolkien and Evangelion, I find this sentiment to be pointless and tinged with misplaced agression.

You wonder why you should care about Tolkien? Why should we care that you care?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The fact that you're a fan of JRR's work and Evangellion means Chris Tolkien should be able to bully whomever he feels like? That doesn't make any sense, but I don't know how else to read your comment.

No, this is entirely wrong, and it shows some small-minded thinking on the part of readers. (1) (And I dont' care how much Karma that burns.)

I object to the content and tone of the button. Whether or not I support Chris Tolkien's actions is immaterial to that. I do not support it, and I support the button maker's freedom of speech. But I also feel compelled to speak out, that the message itself is snide and stupid. Really, do we need to encourage the fragmentation of fandom?

(1) - Whether you support someone's freedom of speech, and whether you think much of what they're saying are entirely separate. Please use your brains and comprehend principles and get beyond simple tribal loyalty.

The discussion concerns the behavior of the Tolkien estate. Your 'so?' will only be interpreted as concerning that behavior. We aren't psychically empowered to understand you are expressing a sentiment about the sentiment expressed by the button that triggered the behavior of the Tolkien estate.

We aren't psychically empowered to understand you are expressing a sentiment about the sentiment expressed by the button that triggered the behavior of the Tolkien estate.

Yes, I've been long aware that the esoteric power of reading comprehension is beyond the reach of many net denizens' psyches. (That's a drink in the stcredzero drinking game.)

How about this for a clue -- I referred directly to the button's content.

Unfortunately, the button's content is not what this article and the subsequent discussion is about: the article is about the behavior of the Tolkien estate and your response will be interpreted as relating to that. In that light, your argument makes little sense, as chc pointed out, but that is not generally a reason to consider a different interpretation. You should realize that most people don't know you're a guy that usually tends to post arguments that makes sense. You may as well be one of the many silly people that does post this kind of nonsensical argument, trying to argue the Tolkien estate is allowed to behave this way because you feel what they targeted was wrong anyway.

Subsequently insulting the intelligence of readers is uncalled for and fails to acknowledge a possible failure on your side. I would argue this is not about our reading comprehension: you failed to make clear that you were deviating from the subject under discussion to make some remarks about a related issue, because you were assuming people would understand that you were not arguing in favor of Tolkien's behavior. That assumption has been proven unwarranted: people don't understand that you won't argue nonsensical things. Which is entirely understandable, considering the amount of people that do argue nonsensical things.

tl;dr - We didn't think about your comment. We assumed you were taking a side. You didn't spell it out for us. We didn't bother to find an interpretation that would make sense.

tl;dr^2 - We are lazy and have poor reading comprehension.

I'm very sorry, if it taxes your imagination that someone would want to talk about what was written on the button. It's not like that would be at all relevant to the article, I guess. (My apologies to the sarcasm impaired.)

When communicating, it is our responsibility to express our thoughts as clearly as possible. Dashing off vaguely worded comments and then insulting the reader when he seeks clarification is not a generally accepted practice in the field of writing.

To explain the confusion better: You say you "referred directly to the button's content," but you didn't. You referred to it obliquely. The grammatical subject of your comment was "this sentiment." That is as specific as you got. The most obvious antecedent is "the sentiment expressed in this article" — which is what people assumed. In order to get your true meaning, the reader has to actually ignore the grammatical structure of your comment and read in a subject which you didn't explicitly mention anywhere and which is actually off-topic for the current discussion (people will generally use the overall topic as context when trying to determine the meaning of ambiguous phrases).

At any rate, insulting people who are confused by imprecise wording is kind of rude.

As for the button's actual content: I think you're taking the jokey posturing too seriously. As he explained in the OP, the reason he liked the phrase is because it reflects an actual divide between the two cultures — almost any fantasy fan will have read Tolkien, whereas many (probably most) sci-fi fans are focused on present series and haven't read, say, Heinlein. Depending on your school of thought, it could be making fun of fantasy fans for being stuck in the past or it could be making fun of sci-fi fans for being ignorant of their own.

  If it taxes your imagination

It's one of at least two reasonable explanations, while the context favors the other. For effective communication you need to consider how the other hears what you are saying.

On a more general note: you are often terse to the point of becoming cryptic. Removing ambiguities and room for interpretation are also effective usages of language. Merely expressing an idea in the shortest possible way is often not as effective in communicating the idea.

I will make 3 statements:

1) hacker news has become www.reddit.com/r/nerdstuff

2) “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.” Niccolo Machiavelli

A lot of energy is being put into user driven content, which seems to start of useful but end up becoming crap. There must be an opportunity in there somewhere.

3) someone reply to my post with "this." so i can move on from this site, and find something useful to do.

"Appropriate for HN" seems to mean "HN is whatever I think it should be."

Maybe you could start up a thread or write something that addresses your perceptions so it can be discussed. Or you can keep acting like a melodramatic clown with a dog-eared dollar looking mournfully at the last functioning drink machine in a post-apocalyptic world.

A world of possibilities awaits.

"Maybe you could start up a thread or write something that addresses your perceptions so it can be discussed"

i thought about it, but i decided that there isn't any point. the site is what the users want it to be and i'm not here to "educate" them.

great analogy, btw.

This.

(is he gone yet?)

last post.

From the guidelines:

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

long time lurker, short time poster.

Where did Machiavelli say that? Let's have a textual reference:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?auth...

Actually, not being a 20th century inspirational business writer, Machiavelli almost certainly said no such thing.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=entrepreneur&...

The only other reference I found was this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Kiam

Found on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-greenberg/save-the-entrep... with blekko

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