Redditor says fans need to be GRATEFUL that The Rings of Power exists
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Whether or not they have the rights to it, it is the material they're riffing on. Valinor, Beleriand, fall of Númenor, the drama with Melkor and Sauron, etc.
It's not an adaptation of the "stories" of The Silmarillion, but there is absolutely no doubt that this is where the material is coming from.
You're both kind of correct. No need to speculate though, they've admitted what they have access to and where this stuff comes from.
All they legally have access to for lotr is the appendixes in the books, untold tales, and Silmarillion. They cannot use anything from the Silmarillion itself.
So they have to be stupidly vague about anything they mention in the story, and fill in the gaps with their own fanfic.
The distinction just isn't important to me. If I see a big talking lion sounding kind of like Jesus and bitch-slapping witches, I'm gonna say "Yeah, that's Aslan, and it's from C. S. Lewis's Narnia books," rights be damned, whether or not this particular story mimics one of the books specifically or not.
As I recall, the rights issue has come up previously, with Tolkein's blue wizards. Maybe it was Bakshi's Lord of the Rings animated feature. For whatever lawyerly reason, the rights had been granularly granted to the point where they could talk about the wizards, but had neglected to secure the right to say the names of these incredibly trivial characters who aren't even featured. So Gandalf refers to them, but has to say some nonsense about not remembering their names. Silliness.
I'm sure this is more of same. They have the rights to this, but not that, maybe they can say the name of one tree because it was mentioned in a poem in Two Towers, but not this other tree because it was only named in Silmarillion.
I don't know about you, but it doesn't matter to me. They're clearly pulling a bunch of stuff that may have been mentioned as an aside in the Rings books, but much of it was further fleshed out (maybe by J.R.R., but more likely by Christopher and Guy Gavriel Kay) in Silmarillion. Whatever it is, it's not completely original content.
Yeah, but there's a huge legal distinction
And that matters, why? The question on the table is where the material is from. We know where the material is from. I don't care even a little what lawyers managed to finagle what rights to exactly which characters can be used in what way.