“Lord of the Rings ”fanfic writer loses lawsuit after accusing Amazon, the Tolkien estate of stealing his ideas

A judge dismissed Demetrious Polychron’s lawsuit as frivolous, after he self-published an unauthorized Tolkien sequel and then attempted to sue the estate.

The fanfiction writer who published an unauthorized sequel to The Lord of the Rings and then attempted to sue Amazon Prime Video and the Tolkien estate for allegedly stealing his ideas has lost in court.

In 2022, author Demetrious Polychron published a book called — wait for it — The Fellowship of the King, touting it as a sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy trilogy. (The book was set about 20 years after the events of Return of the King, name-dropping familiar characters like Samwise Gamgee, Aragorn, and Elrond, and at the time, Polychron billed it as part one of a planned seven-book series.) Earlier this year, Polychron launched a lawsuit against the Tolkien estate and Amazon Prime Video, accusing the TV series The Rings of Power of copyright infringement.

The Tolkien estate later responded with a dueling lawsuit of its own, alleging that it was actually Polychron who committed copyright infringement by publishing and selling the book without permission. Now, per Deadline, a California district court has thrown out Polychron’s case and ruled against him in the estate’s lawsuit.

Polychron was slapped with a permanent injunction, which requires him to destroy all physical and electronic copies of The Fellowship of the King and prevents him from publishing any new work based on Tolkien’s books. The judge also ordered Polychron to pay legal fees for Amazon and the Tolkien estate, totaling around $134,000.

“This is an important success for the Tolkien Estate, which will not permit unauthorized authors and publishers to monetize J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-loved works in this way,” the estate’s UK solicitor Steven Maier said.

In 2022, Amazon launched its blockbuster TV series The Rings of Power, which is set thousands of years before the events of Tolkien’s original trilogy. A second season is expected to debut on Prime Video in 2024.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.