In the ongoing nightmare that is Amazon’s Rings of Power, there was a beacon of light in the form of a hilarious story of a fanfic writer sueing the company for $250 million. In April of 2023, Demetrius Polychron filed a lawsuit against the multi-billion dollar company for allegedly stealing aspects of his idea (which he had registered in 2017) without his consent and using it for their show.
Now, it’s a well known joke that the writers of Rings of Power wrote the script on their Wattpad acount from highschool, but this seemed to be going too far. Naturally, Amazon and the Tolkien Estate fired back against the author (whose name is Demetrius Polychron – he sounds like the type to be writing fanfic) and after eight months, the fanfic writers with more money from Amazon defeated the one trying to sue them. The judge presiding over the lawsuit ordered Polychron to pay $134 thousand in legal fees for the Tolkien Estate and Amazon, and to destroy all digital and physical copies of his fanfic The Fellowship of the King and its sequel The Two Trees.
Honestly, I can’t tell if Polychron was writing these as spoofs or as a serious literary work. They sound like sequels to the spoofs Bored of the Rings and The Sillymarillion. However, it seems Polychron took it as a serious work as he had sent a letter to Simon Tolkien (J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson and the idiot who gave Amazon permission to create Rings of Power) asking him to review and approve The Fellowship of the King shortly after copyrighting it. Two years later, in 2019, Polychron had his agent contact the Tolkien Estate once again, to which they adamantly refused. He then personally went to Simon’s home and delivered the manuscript there before later asking for it back in letter, saying that “he would publish The Fellowship of the King, and an additional six other manuscripts, independently.”
Give the man points for trying, at least.
Obviously, this is an example of why you shouldn’t try to publish fanfiction, especially when it has glaring similarities to the original characters from the original book. While I don’t personally have a problem with fanfiction (unless it’s full of smut and other such crap), I don’t think it should ever be monetized. It’s one thing to be writing new stories about your favorite characters from your favorite book series and posting it on Wattpad, Quotev, Tumblr, etc. but when you are trying to make money off of your fanfiction, that is plagiarism. When the work that you plagiarized is copyrighted, it’s even worse because you can land yourself in this situation. Just because you copyrighted your fanfic doesn’t mean you can now publish it. U.S. copyright law (something that I’m very familiar with as I’ve been trying to figure out how to copyright my books, short stories, and characters), basically operates on the basis of, “You copyrighted it first, therefore, it’s yours.”
For example, if I posted one of my short stories on this website without copyrighting it first, anyone on the internet could stumble across it, decide it’s good, and steal my characters, the plot of my story, the lore of my story, and the names of the kingdoms and world that I’ve created and copyright it under their own name. If I then copyrighted it after that and took them to court, I would lose because of the rule stated earlier. You could be in the right, but if the other person registered it first, then you’re screwed.
Moral of the story: Don’t steal other people’s work and try to pass it off as your own.
The Tanuki Corner 
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