Author JK Rowling is suing a small publishing firm to try and block the publication of an unauthorized lexicon of her work, calling it “wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work,” and “a Harry Potter rip-off of the type I have spent years trying to prevent.”
Judge calls books hard to follow, urges parties to settle
The judge in NY federal court who will decide whether the Harry Potter encyclopedia can be published or whether it violates copyright has said that he read the first half of the first book to his grandchildren and that it was “hard to follow,” and “filled with strange names and words that would be gibberish in any other context.” The judge also urged parties to settle outside of court and said “I think this case, with imagination, could settle. It’s been brought home to me in the last 20 years that litigation is not always the best way to solve things.”
Authors break down on the stand
Both author JK Rowling and the author of the lexicon, 50 year-old Steven Vander Ark, have testified in court. In often emotional testimony Rowling talked about how the books saved her when she was a poverty-striken young mother. Vander Ark broke down crying during his testimony, saying that fans have attacked him for choosing to publish a book based on a popular Harry Potter fan website he maintained for years.
Rowling says she gave author several chances before suing
Rowling says that litigation was her absolute last choice, and that it’s not about money but about theft of ideas. She claims to have asked Vander Ark several times to add more personal commentary and to change her words so that they were not lifted and passed off as his own.
Lawyers for both sides still have plenty of motions and paperwork to submit and it will be weeks before the case is even close to being decided.
You can’t help but think that Rowling would have done better with a jury trial. If that judge got confused by the first book he never could have trudged through the others and is likely to look upon an encyclopedia favorably, even if it’s just a cut and paste of Rowling’s work.
[Details From Timesonline, BBC News, and MSNBC]
Things like this are why there is a new “Harry Potter” type book that comes out every decade or so, gathers a huge following, and then falls off the map completely.
The only franchises to survive the long haul are those that cater to their fanbase, and allow them to create their own little slice of that universe for themselves. That’s why 20 years down the road my daughter is watching the same Star Trek and Star Wars I did at their age.
Just wait and see where Harry Potter is in 20 years, and see if she made the right decision for her legacy.
Fans are allowed to do their own thing. Ever seen the amount of fan fiction for Harry Potter on fanfiction.net? The groups like WIKTT (When I Kissed the Teacher, A Hermione/Snape fan group?), the fan films, websites, and fan art? She loves her fans’ work; she even links to her favorite stuff on her own website. She’s also allowed a ton of “unofficial” books to be published; cliffnotes, “what will happen” books, etc.
Her canon just isn’t open universe, like Star Wars and Star Trek. She let him have the Lexicon website; praised it, and even admitted to using it to look up some of her own information. She’s not even telling him not to publish the Encyclopedia, if you read the article closely…she’s asking him to change it so it’s not cut and paste of her own work. Maybe it’s for money, maybe it’s not; but she allows plenty of fan activity to go on, without saying anything about it. I wouldn’t want people taking what I’d spent 17 years writing, cutting and pasting, and then trying to make money off of it.
And I don’t mean that to sound as aggressive as it did…I happen to have spent ~9 years puttering around the internet in the massive fanbase there, and of many, many people, she’s one of the most accommodating. Take Anne Rice; she makes people take down fan art, fan fiction, etc. She threatened to sue fanfiction.net if they didn’t take the section for her works down.
That guy is a thief and a total jackass. “*Wahh* I stole someone’s ideas and they wont let me profit from them. Life is haaard.”
And that judge! His opinion of the books themselves is completely irrelevant, and he’s a thorough jackass for using the moment to insult the author,
but if he actually couldn’t “follow” them, how did he ever become a judge? He doesn’t sound smart enough to have gone to law school.
@Ginny. Very well said and not in the least agressive!
Whether the judge liked or understood is not the point. If he is at all qualified to be a JUDGE, then he should be able to discern if this is a case of plagiarism or not. I say yes, but I am not qualified to be a judge, so what do I know?
HP will be around in 20 years… it will not fall off the map. I can’t imagine not showing the books to my children, and I am sure other fans will do the same. I hope the movies are long forgotten though.
I think she has a good reason for not wanting him to publish the lexicon. I think the author of it… if he is such a huge fan should respect her wishes and should have gotten her blessing in the first place. She is releasing her own encyclopedia of sorts anyway- with proceeds going to charity.
Maybe I should have made my point clearer. I don’t see this as an issue for one important reason; he’s not cheating her out of the opportunity to do it herself, and thus no money is being lost.
Now, I may be wrong, as I never cared to follow the books – but she’s written the last one right? No more books, no more expanding of the universe, no new material. So it’s not like he’s taking bread from her mouth.
Bottom line; the woman has made more money than God by writing this stuff, and the fans are the ones who provided her with every penny of it. For someone who used to be poor, she sure has forgotten which hand feeds her.
“if he is such a huge fan should respect her wishes and should have gotten her blessing in the first place.”
Yes, excellent point! You would think that would matter to him, and that he would back off if it upset her.
If she agrees to it, fine, but Harry Potter is her creation so she should have veto power.
He just wants to stand on her shoulders and make a fortune off of her hard work. He’s like that photographer Richard Prince who got famous by simply taking photos of other people’s photos.
Scott F. I think there was some talk about Rowling wanting to release a HP encyclopedia herself sometime in the future, so this guy would be taking money from her. Plus, if he’s just copied and pasted her work, then it’s copyright infringement. I can’t even believe the guy (who claims to be a die-hard Rowling fan) is actually contesting this. He really should back down. Make money from your own ideas! Not other people’s!
I think Ginny very well expressed the thoughts of most Harry Potter readers regarding this case.
I, personnally, will not be buying the encyclopedia should it still come out. I’m only afraid that the online version might become available on payment only (which is most probable : I don’t see why he would continue to give away for free information Vander Ark could legally get paid for… This is another issue that this trial brings up and it is a major one !).
This endangers Rowling’s ideas and concepts of the entier magic/muggles world she created entirely.
And also her own future work as she might put out her own encyclopedia.
I morally understand Rowling’s decision to choose.
This would be an open door to many, many possible exploits of the Harry Potter world.
As Ginny put it : Rowling has been very kind towards her fans during all these years. Fanfictions, unofficial books explaining the mythologies behind the Potter world, etc.
But this is stretching too far : it’s a pure compilation of all her ideas and concepts put, for 90% of it, in her own words and descriptions.
Error :
I morally understand Rowling’s decision to sue.
Not choose.
It’s not about money. If someone took stuff I wrote and just cut and pasted it verbatim into a dictionary or chronology I would be pissed, and similar shit happens to me all the time online. Our work here gets plagiarized every day, but what’s worse is when someone takes a whole article and only sort-of rewords parts. It’s still my order of thoughts, my original ideas and my hard work, but someone thinks they have a right to just sort of reword it, using the same structure and thoughts with just a few changes to make it look like their own. That pisses me off more than the cut and pastes.
It’s her writing and they’re marketing it as something new and passing it off as their own. It’s not about someone using her general concepts or ideas and cataloging them, it’s about someone taking her work and just putting it in a different format and selling it.
My 11 year old daughter is obsessed with Harry Potter. She has read all of the books and has had no problem comprehending the deep messeges of love and valor found within its pages…so explain to me how a sitting Judge found the first book confusing. That actually really frightens me!
I would have said drivel myself. Childish over-hyped drivel for kids.
Harry Potter is awful…can’t you all see the plot repeats itself over and over again, here it goes.
“eerie opening credits, harry in trouble, friends are there for him, dumbledore is helpless, more trouble, voldemort evil is coming, no one believes, harry saves the day (somehow), everyone believes now, smiles, end credits”
read the books and this is the same sh** over and over again….
ABSOLUTELY RETARDED!!
Harry Potter rocks! It totally defined my kidulthood – although all books are a borrowing a shaping of ideas preceding them; Rowling worked hard and her success speaks for itself – I understand why she would sue
Hi, i hope you don’t mind me posting here but i tried to subscribe to your RSS and it said “parse error, unexpected T_STRING on line 26
harry potter and steven king stuff, the only books ive ever read haha
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