Gaming's most notable recent copyright case is between the developers of extraction hack-and-slasher Dark and Darker and their former employer, Nexon, which claims that the team is using materials they made while they still worked at Nexon.
A couple recent, interesting cases (which I don't intend to imply are similar to this one): In 2021, a guy sued Activision over a character from Modern Warfare, claiming that he'd created the character first for a film project, and last year, Capcom and a photographer resolved a lawsuit brought by the latter over textures used in Resident Evil 4. Game of Thrones author George RR Martin notoriously dislikes fanfiction, and in a 2010 blog post (opens in new tab) related a story about author Marion Zimmer Bradley (opens in new tab), who apparently wound up scrapping a novel she was working on because a fanfiction writer who'd written a similar story demanded co-authorship.Ĭopyright complaints in the world of gaming are common, too, credible or otherwise. Polychron wants $250 million for his trouble, but I doubt Jeff Bezos is too worried about this one.įor storytellers who aren't Amazon, however, this kind of audacious copyright complaint can be scary. The harfoot Elanor in The Rings of Power is a new character who, if I had to guess, was probably named Elanor because that's the kind of name a proto-hobbit would have, as established by JRR Tolkien, the guy who created hobbits and first named one of them Elanor, and whose work Amazon has a license to adapt. It bears mentioning that the character in Polychron's book is Elanor Gamgee Gardner, a character from The Lord of the Rings, which was written by JRR Tolkien. His book contains a hobbit character named Elanor, and so does The Rings of Power, for example. Its prologue is set in The Shire, and the first character introduced is "Elanor Gamgee Gardner, daughter of Samwise and Rosie." Polychron's dedication page even dedicates the novel to "the life and work" of JRR Tolkien and son Christopher Tolkien, followed by the sentence: "If not for you, this would not be." It is undoubtedly Lord of the Rings fanfiction.Īnd yet, Polychron apparently thinks he has a case, arguing that similarities between The Rings of Power and The Fellowship of the King constitute infringement. (Image credit: Demetrious Polychron/Amazon)īy my estimation, it's more appropriate to say that Polychron's book is based on, not inspired by, The Lord of The Rings.
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