Yes, 2044 is the year when Tolkien’s best-known works enter the public domain (unless laws are changed in the meantime).
By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.
My wife just read a thousand page fan fiction set in the Harry Potter world where the Death Eaters won, Harry Potter is dead, and Draco Malfoy has been assigned to Hermione for “breeding purposes”. The premise sounds like trash, but she was describing the intricacies of how wars are fought and political intrigues and a very personal and relatable story of standing up to power. She literally could not put it down, and said it was one of the most interesting and engaging pieces of literature she’s ever read.
Copyright just lets large corporations keep our shared cultural heritage under lock and key. These worlds are living rent free in our heads. We should be allowed to play around with them at our leisure and tell the stories we want to tell without the threat of financial ruin being brought down upon us.
> a thousand page fan fiction set in the Harry Potter world where the Death Eaters won, Harry Potter is dead, and Draco Malfoy has been assigned to Hermione for “breeding purposes”. The premise sounds like trash, but she was describing the intricacies of how wars are fought and political intrigues and a very personal and relatable story of standing up to power.
Is that what Martin has been doing instead of finishing ASOFAI? Because that sounds exactly like him.
I guess I'll take the bait... why would the scion of a "pure-blood" wizarding family be assigned to breed with someone whose parents are both Muggles? Seems antithetical to the Death Eaters' aims.
My wife’s response, verbatim, she thinks it’s hilarious that I mentioned it here.
“Okay, so it was explained that Lord V didn’t actually care about pure blood, he was a mud blood himself. That was just to get the pure blood families on board with his revolution.
And he didn’t actually care about the babies, it was just that Malfoy was a really good mind reader (I forget the technical term) and he wanted Hermione’s hidden memories to root out all the secret members of the order.
But the wizard pop culture was really into the babies so it was more of a PR thing.“
She said she highly appreciated the realistic political stuff in the book. Anyway this is as much thought as I’m willing to put into this topic, you’re welcome to search “Manacled Harry Potter” if you really want to learn more.
Thanks for elaborating. Having read (and then listened to Stephen Fry read) the Harry Potter series during lock-down, that sounds like it would be worth checking out.
One person’s genre-bending fan fiction is another person’s worthless porn…
But there are some interesting works diegetically aligned with the Tolkien universe that currently can’t be published or developed in the West for copyright reasons.
I’m thinking of the Russian pro-Mordor “The Last Ringbearer,” for example:
> The Court of Appeals recognized copyright in several characters from Gone with the Wind and found that The Wind Done Gone had "appropriate[d] numerous characters, settings, and plot twists". However, the court decided that this appropriation was protected under the doctrine of fair use.
> ... Mitchell's estate chose to drop the suit after publisher Houghton agreed to make a donation to Morehouse College.
By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.