Okay, to give you a brief overview of the conflict over Lovecrafts works.
There's R.H Barlow, who Lovecraft intended to gain the rights but was never actually put into his will before he died. Resulting in Barlow being given control over the rights by Lovecrafts aunt. However he was a writer, not a lawyer, and was not technically the owner specified in the Will.
August Derleth helped Lovecraft, came up with the name 'Cthulhu Mythos', and after Lovecrafts death published some of his works, or republished them in volume collections. It became unclear where Derleth's contributions ended, and how his republications and publications affected the rights to Lovecrafts works. Due to the unclear status of Barlow's claim, Derleth tried to essentially carve away a huge chunk of Lovecrafts works for his own.
Donald Wandrei was Derleth's co-conspirator in the republications of Lovecrafts works. Neither Derleth or Wandrei were malicious, they wanted to keep Lovecrafts works alive, hence the republications. But he also used these publications and republications to try and lay claim to parts of Lovecrafts works. Some for himself, some in conjunction with Derleth.
They created Arkham publishing iirc, and then brought the Weird Tales magazine where most of Lovecrafts works had originally been published. This essentially raised the question of how much ownership Weird Tales had over these stories, as well as Derleth and Wandrei. Essentially creating a triple conglomerate of separate but interconnected ownership claims over multiple different stories that fought with Barlow for control. The disputed eventually coming down to 'who owns which story, name, character, etc'.
Basically take how Lord of the Rings is split between Amazon owning the Appendix, Warner Bros owning the rest of both books, Games Workshop owning the game licence and the Tolkien estate technically owning parts of all of them. And then make it twenty times more complicated.
Because there's a third faction involved.
Remember Lovecrafts aunt? Technically she is the beneficiary as Lovecraft never managed to add Barlow to his will. She supported Barlow's claim even though her own was legally stronger.
When she died her kids inherited her claim.
Ethel Morris and Edna Lewis proceeded to inherit their aunts claim in the 50's, then switch sides to Derleth and Wandrei and the Arkham Publishing group. However there's another twist, far from just supporting Arkham Publishing, they in fact claimed that they themselves owned the entirety of Lovecrafts copyrighted works, and they were just renting them out to Arkham, complete rejecting Barlow's claims and Derleth and Wandrei's own claims of partial co-ownership.
This all got so messy that, by the time it came to renew the copyright, no one could even remember the time limit was up, or who was supposed to control what, which resulted in the Library of Congress getting involved and saying the deadline was likely missed, putting much of Lovecrafts works in the public domain in the 2000's. However the works published after his death are still copyrighted, and the dispute as to who owns then still simmers to this day.
