In an $80 million lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and obtained by
The Hollywood Reporter, the Tolkien estate and its book publisher HarperCollins claim Warner Bros., its New Line subsidiary and
Rings/Hobbit rightsholder Saul Zaentz Co. have infringed the copyright in the famous books and breached a contract. The crux of the suit is the estate's contention that a decades-old rights agreement entitles the studio to create only "tangible" merchandise based on the books, not an "online slot machine" or other digital exploitations that the estate calls highly offensive.
Read the full lawsuit here.
"The original contracting parties thus contemplated a limited grant of the right to sell consumer products of the type regularly merchandised at the time (such as figurines, tableware, stationery items, clothing and the like," the complaint states. "They did not include any grant of exploitations such as electronic or digital rights, rights in media yet to be devised or other intangibles such as rights in services."
Hence, the
Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring: Online Slot Game, which the estate claims it learned about via a spam e-mail to its atttorney in Sept. 2010, caused it to investigate the scope of its rights agreement. The estate says it then learned that Warner Bros. is planning traditional slot machines with
Rings characters, as well as other products outside the limited scope of its original rights deal.
