On the Tolkien Society site, there is a post about winning an auction which contains the negative of this image and claims the copyrights are included. The post makes it clear that the chairman, Shaun Gunner, only purchased these photos with the intent of selling copies. He also spent more time writing about the female photographer's bio than anything else.
The about the author is very revealing:
Shaun is the Chair of The Tolkien Society. First elected in 2013, Shaun has overseen the Society's expansion from 600 to 3,500 members. Shaun regularly speaks about adaptations of Tolkien's works and the future of Tolkien scholarship whilst passionately believing the Society needs to reach out to new audiences. In his spare time he can be found playing video games and Lego, or on Twitter. He also chairs another charity, Mankind, and is a local councillor.
His twitter profile boasts of working at the UK Conservative Campaign Headquarters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, which appears to currently be awarded for great contributions to the destruction of culture.
Shaun Gunner is the poz incarnate and the single greatest threat to Tolkien's legacy.
They did distribute it - they uploaded it to Twitter with the intent that Twitter would send it to anyone who read their Tweet - but it's still absurd to call this copyright infringement - it has to be fair use to use some photo of a real person even though every photo might be the intellectual property of some photographer or another.
Even if that wasn't the case, the Tolkien Society doesn't deserve to call itself the Tolkien Society if they're more interested in taking this photo out of circulation than sharing it.
IANAL but I don't think it's generically fair use to use a photo to talk about someone. You may seek one in the public domain or just use words to say what you want. That's why most of the photos were removed from Wikipedia at some point and replaced with mostly lower quality ones that were in the public domain.
For the unaware. The TS are a bunch of wokesters: https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/1405769157228990473
Do you have permission to fill his stories full of soy and faggotry?
On the Tolkien Society site, there is a post about winning an auction which contains the negative of this image and claims the copyrights are included. The post makes it clear that the chairman, Shaun Gunner, only purchased these photos with the intent of selling copies. He also spent more time writing about the female photographer's bio than anything else.
The about the author is very revealing:
His twitter profile boasts of working at the UK Conservative Campaign Headquarters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, which appears to currently be awarded for great contributions to the destruction of culture.
Shaun Gunner is the poz incarnate and the single greatest threat to Tolkien's legacy.
They did distribute it - they uploaded it to Twitter with the intent that Twitter would send it to anyone who read their Tweet - but it's still absurd to call this copyright infringement - it has to be fair use to use some photo of a real person even though every photo might be the intellectual property of some photographer or another.
Even if that wasn't the case, the Tolkien Society doesn't deserve to call itself the Tolkien Society if they're more interested in taking this photo out of circulation than sharing it.
IANAL but I don't think it's generically fair use to use a photo to talk about someone. You may seek one in the public domain or just use words to say what you want. That's why most of the photos were removed from Wikipedia at some point and replaced with mostly lower quality ones that were in the public domain.
I wanna shake the hand of whatever chad that sold them the image. Some people deserve to get scammed.
In other news, Tolkien has generated 700 Gigawats today with his rotations.
Much like The Patriot Act and other such misnomers, The Tolkien Society has nothing to do with what they are actually named after.