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The Tolkien Estate and Amazon have been victorious in their court battle with an author who first published a book titled The Fellowship of the King and then demanded $250M after claiming Prime Video had stolen the idea for its TV series.
In court documents issued by the District Court of California on December 14, both cases brought by Demetrious Polychron were thrown out by Judge Stephen V. Wilson, who ordered Polychron to pay the Tolkien Estate and Amazon’s legal fees totalling around $134,000 (read the Tolkien order here).
In 2017, the same year Warner Bros and the Tolkien Estate settled their five-year $80 million rights legal battle, Polychron registered a fan fiction sequel book titled The Fellowship of the King, which he claimed to be the “the pitch-perfect sequel to The Lord of the Rings,” according to the Tolkien Estate lawyers. Rather incredibly, he then commenced a $250M lawsuit against the Tolkien Estate and Amazon in April of this year, claiming that Amazon’s TV series The Rings of Power infringed the copyright in his book.
Wilson’s judgment threw out the claims around the Amazon TV series and granted a permanent injunction, which prevents Polychron from ever distributing any further copies of The Fellowship of the King, his planned sequels to that book, or any other derivative work based on the books of JRR Tolkien. He is also required to destroy all physical and electronic copies of his book and to file a declaration, under penalty of perjury, that he has complied. The judge also turned down Polychron’s requests to have his legal fees paid by Amazon and the estate.
Steven Maier, the Tolkien Estate’s UK solicitor, said: “This is an important success for the Tolkien Estate, which will not permit unauthorized authors and publishers to monetize JRR Tolkien’s much-loved works in this way.” Deadline has reached out to Polychron for comment and will update this post if and when he responds.
Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV series is the most expensive TV series of all time and a second season is in the offing.
Last year, Swedish video game company acquired Middle-earth Enterprises, a division of The Saul Zaentz Company, which owned the intellectual property catalogue and worldwide rights to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. Under existing copyright laws, Tolkien’s work will enter the public domain in the US on Jan. 1, 2044 – 95 years after his first work was published.
Lance Koonce and Gili Karev of Klaris Law, New York, represented the Tolkien Estate.
Dominic Patten contributed to this report
