Tolkien estate blocks ‘The Lord of the Rings’ JRR Token

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The Lord of the Rings-themed ‘JRR Token’ has met a “bag end” after being forced to shut shop fol­low­ing legal action from the fam­i­ly and estate of the famed series’ author. J.R.R. Tolkien who died in 1973.

On Nov. 23, Law360 report­ed that the Tolkien Estate had reached a set­tle­ment with Flori­da-based devel­op­er Matthew Jensen over his JRR Token, which was launched in August this year. Accord­ing to BSC­Scan, the BEP-20 token is only held by 510 address­es, with a mar­ket sup­ply of 19 trillion. 

Accord­ing to the set­tle­ment, Jensen promised to shut down the token and delete any con­tent which infringes the estate’s trade­mark rights to the J.R.R. Tolkien name and intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty relat­ing to “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hob­bit.” He also agreed to pay the estate’s legal costs, which weren’t disclosed. 

The JRR Token’s Twit­ter account and YouTube chan­nel and web­site have since been deleted.

The estate’s lawyer, Steve Maier, described the case as a “par­tic­u­lar­ly fla­grant case of infringe­ment,” adding that the estate is “pleased that it has been con­clud­ed on sat­is­fac­to­ry terms.” 

This comes after the estate suc­cess­ful­ly recov­ered the web­site domain name ‘jrrtoken.com’ after fil­ing a com­plaint with the World Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Orga­ni­za­tion (WIPO) on Aug. 10 – only four days after Bil­ly Boyd, the actor who played Pip­pin, endorsed the token in a 40-sec­ond YouTube cameo on Aug. 4. 

At the time, WIPO ruled that Jensen reg­is­tered and used the domain name in “bad faith.” The dis­put­ed domain name was reg­is­tered on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2021.

Fol­low­ing the rul­ing, Jensen changed the domain name to ‘thetokenofpower.com’. How­ev­er, accord­ing to Tolkien’s Estate, the new web­site still includ­ed images of rings, Hob­bit holes, and a wiz­ard with a strik­ing resem­blance to Gandalf.

Jensen’s lawyers argued that the dis­put­ed domain name ‘JRR Token’ is not “is not iden­ti­cal or con­fus­ing­ly sim­i­lar” to the Tolkien estate’s trade­marked ‘JRR Tolkien’ because it doesn’t con­tain the addi­tion­al let­ters ‘L’ and ‘I’, and is also pro­nounced differently. 

Source: JRR Token

They also claimed that he select­ed the domain name because “JRR” stands for “Jour­ney through Risk to Reward,” and “jrrcrypto.com” was unavailable. 

Relat­ed: Mira­max sues Taran­ti­no over ‘mon­ey grab’ Pulp Fic­tion NFTs

How­ev­er, they weren’t able to per­suade WIPO pan­el mem­ber John Swin­son, who said that the “web­site is clear­ly a com­mer­cial ven­ture, which is clever but not humor­ous.” He added:

“There is no doubt that the Respon­dent was aware of Tolkien’s works and cre­at­ed a web­site to trade off the fame of these works.”

On Sep­tem­ber 9, the JRR Token announced plans to release a PvP dig­i­tal card game called ‘Dawn Ris­ing’ in ear­ly 2022 where play­ers could wager their JRR Tokens. The TRR Token project had already list­ed nine non­fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs) for sale on the OpenSea mar­ket­place, with an account trad­ing vol­ume of 0.18 ETH or around $4.200 at the time of reporting. 



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