Fans have gotten used to a franchise turning up somewhere it has no business being. A mobile game, a cereal box, a theme park queue, a card set. The usual reaction is to ask whether the thing counts as canon, and that is the wrong question to start with.
The better one is who actually signed for it. A single invented world can be owned in pieces by four or five companies at the same time, and the pieces were often cut decades ago by people who had never heard of a smartphone. Casino and sweepstakes games sit at the far end of that chain, and one of them ended up in a federal courthouse over a sentence written in 1969.
One Fictional World, Several Owners At Once
Middle-earth is the clearest case to work through, because the company that licenses it publishes its own timeline.
In 1969 United Artists acquired the film, television, stage and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from J.R.R. Tolkien, who kept the book publishing rights. The Saul Zaentz Production Company bought those rights from United Artists in 1976, traded as Tolkien Enterprises from 1977, and renamed itself Middle-earth Enterprises in 2010. Embracer Group bought the company in 2022.
None of those transactions touched the books. By the time Peter Jackson's trilogy reached theaters between 2001 and 2003, three separate parties held live interests in the same story, and none of them could act for the others.
Layer | Who controls it, per the published record | What that layer cannot reach |
|---|---|---|
The Books And The Name | The Tolkien Estate | Films, merchandise and games sold under the 1969 grant |
The Adaptation Rights | Middle-earth Enterprises, Embracer owned since 2022 | The text of the novels themselves |
The Film Trilogies | New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros. | Any category the 1969 wording never listed |
The Game Build | The studio that designs and ships the title | Use of the brand outside its own contract |
The Player Account | The site that runs the finished game | Everything above it in the chain |
Two names on one contract is common further down. The timeline lists Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in 2014 and Middle-earth: Shadow of War in 2017, both developed by Monolith Studios and released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment under a joint license from New Line Cinema and Middle-earth Enterprises. One game, two grantors, because the film side and the book side are held by different companies.
Read down the middle column and the word owner stops being useful. Each party holds a slice and answers to the slice above it. The studio building a game signs with the rights company, the rights company works inside a contract from 1969, and the estate sits outside that contract holding the novels and the name.
The Scope Of A Grant Is Measured In Books, Not Worlds
A license does not cover a world. It covers text, and a specific stretch of it.
Middle-earth Enterprises describes its own license to the literary works as reaching the characters, events, places and things of the Third Age, as detailed in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices. That is a boundary written into a sentence, and it is one reason adaptations keep circling the same handful of events while the Appendices get mined for everything they have.
The consequences show up in products fans already own. The company's timeline records that in 2005 New Line and Warner Bros. put out merchandise drawn from the films under one license, while separate agreements covered merchandise drawn exclusively from the books. Same world, two paperwork trails, different art on the shelf.
The 2007 release of The Lord of the Rings Online carried the constraint on its face. Turbine built it under a license based on the literary property only, so its designers worked from the novels rather than from the films that had filled theaters four years earlier. That was a contract term before it was an art direction.
How A Rights Holder Decides, In Its Own Words
Middle-earth Enterprises publishes the procedure it uses, and it reads like an application rather than a negotiation.
A company needs at least three years of experience designing, manufacturing and selling the exact product line it wants to license. The example on the page is t-shirts: three years in t-shirts before anyone will discuss a t-shirt carrying a Middle-earth name. Selling first and applying afterward is ruled out in the same paragraph.
The submission then asks for company history, a catalog of past work, a proposed product, a proposed territory and a suggested royalty rate. Applicants are told not to send proprietary creative ideas, warned that meeting the qualifications guarantees nothing, and asked to allow up to eight weeks for a reply. Those licensing procedures sit on the company's own site alongside its current licensees.
Look at that list again and notice who supplies each answer. The applicant names the territory and names the rate, so the price of a franchise never appears anywhere a fan could look it up. The owner supplies the yes or the no, and it is the only party in the exchange that never has to put a number on anything.
The same site sorts its own sections into films, stage plays, consumer products, video games and location based experiences. What lands inside those headings can still be enormous. Wizards of the Coast put out a Magic: The Gathering crossover in June 2023, which the timeline describes as the most successful release of that card game to date.
Working out who currently holds what is a matter of watching those announcements as they land, one product at a time. PlayUSA posts its short items from the casino side of that beat at instagram.com/playusacom.
All of that describes a company that wants a license and asks for one. The other route is to hold an old grant already and argue that it stretched far enough, which is how this business ended up in front of a judge.
Slot Machines Are Where The 1969 Wording Went To Court
In November 2012 the Tolkien Estate brought copyright infringement claims against Warner Bros., and gambling machines sat at the center of the complaint.
The estate argued that merchandising rights sold in 1969 covered tangible goods, not downloadable video games and not slot machines sold to casinos around the world. Its filing said Warner Bros. and its subsidiaries had asserted rights over products the old agreement never covered, among them hotel, restaurant and gaming merchandise.
The 26-page complaint put the objection in the language of readers rather than lawyers. Fans, it said, had expressed "confusion and consternation at seeing 'The Lord of the Rings' associated with the morally-questionable (and decidedly non-literary) world of online and casino gambling." The estate asked for $80 million.
The case ran for almost five years and then stopped. In 2017 the estate filed papers in the Central District of California to dismiss it, telling the court that the parties had "amicably resolved their differences and no longer wish to pursue the claims pled in the complaint."
Courthouse News reported the dismissal and the terms of the original claim, quoting an attorney for the estate who said both sides looked forward to working together.
A settlement decides one dispute and sets no general rule. What the record does show is what these arguments are really about. Not the artwork, not the math inside the machine, but whether an old sentence stretches over a category nobody had imagined when it was typed.
What A Sweepstakes Casino Actually Licenses, And From Whom
Sweepstakes casinos are the newest kind of product to want a licensed world on it, and the decision that puts one there sits a long way above the site a player opens. Their legal treatment in the United States is contested rather than settled, and that argument belongs to legislators and courts. The licensing question underneath it is separate, older, and answerable.
Start with who is qualified to sign. By the standard Middle-earth Enterprises publishes, the applicant is the company with years behind it in that exact product line, which on a branded casino game means the studio that builds the game. The site a reader opens is not the company on that form. It carries finished titles supplied to it, and its own contract runs to the studios rather than to whoever owns the world on the reels.
The same report that covered the Tolkien dismissal describes the disputed machines as sold to casinos around the world, and that word sold puts the venue outside the argument. A casino bought a cabinet. It was not a party to the 1969 grant and had no standing to say what the grant covered, which is exactly the position a sweepstakes platform occupies one product generation later.
Two beats cover the two halves of this and neither one reaches the middle. PlayUSA covers sweepstakes casinos at https://www.playusa.com/sweepstakes-casinos/, entertainment reporters cover who owns which slice of a franchise, and the agreement that ties a world to a game is a private commercial document that neither side gets to read.
Rights holders publish what they are willing to discuss. Heroic Signatures, which handles Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Kult, Mutant Chronicles and Mutant Year Zero, asks anyone making an approach to pick a world and then pick a medium. The named media are television and film, comics and books, video games, tabletop RPGs and merchandise, with everything outside them left to a line marked others.
A casino product of any kind falls in that last line. It is not an extension of a grant that already exists, and nobody at the studio end can treat it as one. It is a named product, a named territory and a proposed rate, argued from scratch, with an owner who has no obligation to explain a refusal.
Which leaves the question fans ask last and should ask first. Licenses of this kind run for a term. When one ends, the title built on it goes with it, and the platform showing that title has no claim to keep it, because the right was never held down there in the first place. Who owns the name, what the licensee controls and what happens when the deal lapses are three separate questions, and all three were settled before the artwork was drawn.
When An Official Version Does Not Exist, Someone Decided That
The part of the chain fans notice most is the version that was never made, and it usually has the least paperwork behind it.
The Tolkien Estate states its position without much cushioning. TOLKIEN is a registered trademark, so a club or society needs a license before it can use the name. The estate does not grant permission for its copyright works to be used in marketing or promoting goods, services or events, and says that policy covers charitable and not-for-profit uses as well as commercial ones.
It also says it acts against attempts to commercialize the works, naming maps of Middle-earth and the One Ring inscription among the material it has moved on.
So one owner licenses merchandise while another refuses promotional use of what it holds, and both are describing the same imagined world. That is not a contradiction. It is what happens when a story is divided into slices and each slice acquires its own policy, its own lawyers and eventually its own owner.
Whatever the next unlikely category turns out to be, it will reach a franchise the same way. A world, a medium, a territory and a rate, written on a form and answered upstairs. The new artwork is the easiest part of the whole arrangement.