SMS
RSS feeds
Reddit
NewsvineVoldemort is not J.K. Rowling’s only enemy these days.
Enlarge
The author of the world-renowned “Harry Potter” series recently filed a copyright lawsuit against the publication of an unofficial “Harry Potter Lexicon” by RDR Books. Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and Law School lecturer, has been dueling Rowling in court as a representative of RDR this April.
Joined by Falzone are David Hammer, a formal federal prosecutor, and others including Jennifer Urban, a visiting professor at the Stanford Law School. Urban also directs the Intellectual Property Clinic at the University of Southern California Law School. Hearings began on April 14 and lasted three days.
Rowling claims that the lexicon, which was initially intended to serve as a reference guide to her series of books and films, provided no real original insight to the works, and that it relied too heavily on her own work.
The author of the Lexicon, Steven Jan Vander Ark, admitted during testimony that he was one of Rowling’s biggest fans. Before deciding to actually write a book about the world of Harry Potter, Vander Ark had managed a Web site dealing with similar material.
When Vander Ark and RDR Books sought to publish the book, Rowling stepped in and argued that sales of the Lexicon would interrupt sales of the actual Potter books. In response, Vander Ark argued that only those who had already bought, read and enjoyed Rowling’s books would be interested in any kind of referential text for them.
Rowling said that the scope of the case extended beyond her selling books or not. For her, it is a matter of protecting the intellectual property and hard work of writers. She told The New York Times that if she loses the trial “the flood gates will open,” and writers everywhere will lose control of their material.
But Falzone told The Daily that, “for hundreds of years people have been free to write dictionaries and supplementary materials free of restraint.”
“Rowling’s books,” he said, “have already sold hundreds of millions of copies.”
RDR Books, he said, was of the mindset that a dictionary of Potter terms would in no way encroach upon the sales of the Harry Potter book series.
In the trial’s closing arguments, Falzone said that under the law, the most important thing to consider was not the quality of the book but whether it transformed Rowling’s material in some way.
Vander Ark was sure that his work did not do this. He told The New York Times that the Harry Potter Lexicon “organizes, synthesizes and distills” thousands of pages and “somewhere near a million words.”
Judge Robert Patterson chose to hear the trial without a jury. He gave the case’s lawyers three weeks’ time to prepare some final papers, at which point he will make his ruling.
In the meantime, Falzone assures he is no Death Eater out to get Rowling. Though the lawyer had never read a Harry Potter book before the trial, when he took the case he decided to read the first book of the series and see two of the movies, which he described as “absolutely charming.”