Enlarge / A screenshot from jrrtoken.com. All similarities to LOTR were purely coincidental, apparently.
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The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, has successfully vanquished a cryptocurrency that styled itself as “The One Token That Rules Them All.”
The JRR Token cryptocurrency launched in August, with a website that featured rings, hobbit holes, and a wizard with an uncanny resemblance to Gandalf.
But the Tolkien estate, which handles the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings fantasy novels, quickly stepped in to lodge a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the global forum for intellectual property policy.
It noted that the cryptocurrency’s website domain name infringed its trademarks. Tolkien’s novels have been made into a trilogy of Hollywood films, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Ian McKellen.
In response, lawyers for Matthew Jensen, JRR Token’s Florida-based developer, said that “token” was a generic term, should not be confused with the surname Tolkien, and it did not infringe any intellectual property.
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