The product, which was released in August, allegedly infringed on the author’s trademark, according to attorneys for the estate.
Rings, hobbit holes, and a wizard resembling Gandalf appeared on websites selling and promoting the cryptocurrency, including jrrtoken.com and thetokenofpower.com.
The estate’s legal bills were paid by a developer located in the United States, according to the attorneys.
One day after tokens for the crypto-currency ($JRR) were on sale, and the estate filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with the objective of “organizing the people around a usual goal of making JRR Token ‘The One Token That Will Rule Them All.”
According to the attorneys, this was extremely close to the passage from The Lord of the Rings book about “one ring to rule them all.”
The domain name jrrtoken.com, which was created in February 2021, was “particularly designed to deceive” people into thinking it had a true business relationship with the author.
“The fact that the challenged domain name induces the complainant’s trademarks is proof of the parody presented by the JRR Token mark, not of any suspected bad faith,” the developer explains.
“JRR” stood for “Journey via Risk to Reward,” a connection to “a one-of-a-kind type of digital money.”
The WIPO commented that it is not obvious to the board what ‘ The Voyage from Risk to Reward’ actually means, or why the phrase ‘The Voyage’ applies to the sale of tokens.
The defendant does not explain why the questioned domain name is nail-biting, entertaining, or amusing.
It was not merely a domain name chosen because of its similarity to the [Tolkien estate] trademarks to profit from its evocation.”
There was no query that the developer was conscious of Tolkien’s books and had founded a website “to profit from their renown.”
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have sold over 100 million copies globally, translated into 36 languages.
The estate counsel Steven Maier commented that the Tolkien estate has a responsibility to protect the individuality of JRR Tolkien and the scopes of his much-loved novels.
It is an extremely blatant example of the breach, in which the cryptocurrency was connected to JRR Tolkien’s name and had one job, that is in directive to benefit financially.
This move, according to the estate, “sends a clear message that third parties will not be allowed to profit from JRR Tolkien’s name and literature.”
He went on to say that the estate dealt with a “substantial volume of trademark infringement” on a regular basis and that it was “continually monitoring activities in the cryptocurrency and NFT [non-fungible token] sectors.”
It’s getting more typical for new crypto-currencies to try to profit from well-known companies.
In October, an alleged hoax developed a digital currency based on the South Korean Netflix sitcom Squid Game.