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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in how this would work in New Zealand. Could I publish a version of The Hobbit on amazon.co.nz? Would this be perfectly legal? If I instead published it on my own New Zealand based blog, maybe even hosted on a data center in NZ, but with no attempt to geo-fence it would that cause issues?

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The real interesting question is: what does this mean for our hobbit based tourism industry? What angle can someone take to make a buck now?

Special edition hand printed and bound in the Shire (aka Matamata)? Sell it to people coming off of the Hobbiton tour.

If you don't reference the Jackson movies, can you sell those tourists a One Ring or a Sting without paying for licensing?

That is indeed an interesting question. Presumably if you reimagined those things, without reference to the imagery in the movies, that would be completely legitimate right?

Countries that block pirate sites, like the UK, could block your site. They might also put political pressure on New Zealand to force you to manage the geofencing yourself.

If you just post it to a NZ Gutenberg branch I doubt anyone would come for you. The Canadian Gutenberg project has lots of stuff that is only public domain there, and in places like NZ. It is not geofenced.

Not only that, could an author from NZ create stories based on Tolkien writings? I suppose so, right?

I mean - it's the whole point isn't it? To allow things to become part of the public consciousness. To borrow from that and extend upon it, to embellished and exaggerate it. Seems fine to me.

Presumably you can't then sell that into countries where the inspiration isn't yet public domain?

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