Lord of the Ka-chings.

It takes time and money to run an online community of 32,000. Lots of time, lots of money. Which is why Philip Kooijman, after founding the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza in May 2001 and overseeing its phenomenal growth in the last few years, built a shop to meet mounting costs and keep the forum free to members. He also took care to set this shop up as an affiliate of the official shop run by New Line, which, of course, is the primary backer and distributor of Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy.

Kooijman saw to all this two and a half years ago. Suddenly, it seems, New Line can't remember. As he carefully explains in a lengthy post at the Plaza, Kooijman has received a letter from New Line's lawyers saying, basically, "What's all this then? A shop at the domain www.lordoftheringsshop.com? Never heard of it. Cease and desist. And give us that domain. For free. Immediately."

The timing is either extraordinarily unfortunate or potentially quite lucrative, depending on whether you're the sender or receiver of that letter. Kooijman spells out how things look from his end:

I have worked for over 2 years to get that shop so popular and high ranked in all search engines that we get about 8000 visitors daily in the shop. If we have to move the shop to another domain then we are going to lose our links from other sites and our high rankings will no longer be ours but New Line's. Two years of search engine optimization work will now become New Line's for free... you can understand how upset I am about this!

Oh, yes. For the moment, with six weeks to go before the opening of Return of the King, he's moving the shop to a new domain, www.lordotringsshop.com, and then, in a very smart, very understandable, but for me, momentarily frustrating move, Kooijman has added a recent note: "In your posts keep your words civilised about [New Line]. We do not want to provoke them!"

Very well. I suppose, though, it'd be alright to calmly note that New Line has already made quite a bundle off LOTR on its own and stands to make another big fat one this Christmas season with or without the fruits of Kooijman's labor?

Short shorts:

A blush and a note of thanks to Manohla Dargis for her too kind mention of GC Daily in her column - and to the Los Angeles Times for once again running that column outside the subscribers-only area. We love and respect you, Manohla.

Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan raise hell in an extract from Norma Farnes's Spike: An Intimate Memoir. Also in the Guardian: Empire magazine's "cheesiest movie moments." Independence Day takes the cake, but you could have guessed that one.

Armond White in Alternet and Africana.com on The Human Stain, "one of the bravest - and strangest - Hollywood movies in recent years."

In the New York Times today, by the way, AO Scott responds to White's "awfully harsh" argument mentioned below, the one about the whole screeners brouhaha. And speaking of the NYT, 'tis the season already.

Posted by dwhudson at November 3, 2003 5:21 AM