An Essay on Image Branding
Matthew Bass

All right, so this isn't exactly movie related, but it's something that's been bothering me for quite a while. Certain other movie sites, which I won't name here, tend to take on the attitude that they, in fact, own pictures from the Lord of the Rings films, and they even go so far as to brand these pics with their own site's logo before posting them. I don't know about all of you, but I think that's totally ridiculous.

These pics belong to New Line Cinema, not any single movie site. By branding them, this particular movie site is performing an action that is detrimental to the online Tolkien community. I have approached them about their actions, but they simply claim that these pics that were taken by New Line, produced by New Line, created by New Line, copyrighted by New Line do, in fact, belong to them, so they have every right to brand them. As I said, ridiculous.

I'm wondering if, perhaps, a petition should be started to try to get these particular movie sites to open up and share *New Line's* pics with the entire online Tolkien community without mangling them first. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I hate the folks at these other sites, it's just that I think what they're doing greatly harms the image of J.R.R. Tolkien online. What do you think? Send me an e-mail and let me know what you think should be done.

Anyway, I just wanted to rant about that. Thanks for reading, and for continuing to visit TolkienMovies.com, where pictures have NEVER been branded and never will be! Speaking of which, have you checked out our new image search engine yet? Click here to experience pure Tolkien bliss... an image search engine and dynamically updating pages. Some sites just seem to care more about the online Tolkien community than others. Enjoy!