The author in question here was pretty shitty. He wrote his own sequel to called “Fellowship of the King”, and then sued Amazon and the Tolkien estate saying they stole elements from his book. He lost, and the Tolkien estate countersued.
The guy played stupid games and won stupid prizes.
Because every surgery has risks, including simple ones. In this case, there would be no direct medical reason to do so.
This, right here, is really important. We already have otherwise useful things being bricked because the software is no longer updated, or worse, the company goes bankrupt. If that’s our future with brain implants, that’s going to be a big problem.
The books go into public domain in 20 years. Now that Christopher Tolkien is out of the way (who tended to block a lot of stuff, for better or worse) , the current heirs want as much out of it as they can.
20 years might sound like a lot, but that’s about as much time as between the Peter Jackson movies and now.