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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scarbonac" data-source="post: 946084" data-attributes="member: 9129">From Amazon.com:<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/167133/ref%3Ded%5Fcp%5F7%5F2%5Fb/104-4026531-7730340" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/167133/ref=ed_cp_7_2_b/104-4026531-7730340</a>The article continues to state that JRRT might have seen the word and forgotten that he had seen it. And...? It's not the word itself, it's the application; the word  orc in some form existed prior to Tolkien, but not in his specific application. ''Jesus'' isn't (and prolly can't be) copyrighted or trademarked, but try and create & publicize a cartoon about/T-shirt featuring/short story about South Park Jesus without being sued. The right to create derivative works lies with the copyright holder except in the case of parody or satire, which also makes the bulk of fanfiction a gross copyright violation, but most people won't expend the energy to run it down...except Anne McCaffrey and maybe a few others.  Captain Marvel of SHAZAM! fame was put out of business not because the character too closely resembled Superman, but because many of his adventures were deliberate rip-offs of previously-published (and copyrighted) Superman stories. If I want to write comics about ''Superman'', a character who is a consummate computer hacker and cracker, that's cool...but if you start writing about ''Superman'' who is the last son of Krypton, you'd better be working for DC Comics.A ''hobbit'' that was counted as a member of ''a class of spirits'' was probably considered to be something along the lines of a booka, brownie, pixie, sprite,  et cetera...all of which are magical faerie critters and nothing like the decidedly un-magical  Middle-Earth hobbits. Middle-Earth Hobbits, created by Tolkien, are not  in any way ''fey-like'' nor are they ''a class of spirits''; they are romanticized fat little hairy-footed commoners of the  romanticized English countryside. The appearance of the word ''hobbit'' in an obscure reference-work means nothing in that respect. If I wanted to create a character who uses an Uzi, is 6' tall and calls himself ''Hobbit'', I can; but if I want to write about fat little furry-footed country Englishmen who live in tunnel-houses and call them ''hobbits'', then the Tolkien estate has a perfect right to come after my ass on copyright violations.Back to orcs, the putative topic of the thread -- Elizabeth Moon's The Deed Of Paksenarrion is replete with orcs, but then again, TDOP also has the best depiction of a D&D-genre campaign-world that I have ever seen in novel form, bar none.</blockquote>

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