Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling takes a dim view of independently authored reference books, it seems. She’s joined a lawsuit to stop the publication of a fan-written reference book based on a website that she herself admitted to using while fact checking her writing.
From Salon’s Machinist blog:
In the past, Rowling has offered high praise for the HPL. “This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing),” she says on her site. She calls the HPL “a website for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home.”
Thanks to such acclaim, Vander Ark recently landed a publishing contract with RDR Books to put out a printed version of the online lexicon. His book was to have gone on sale this fall.
You might suppose that given her appreciation of the online HPL, Rowling would have encouraged the book’s publication and sale. But you’d be wrong. On Halloween, Rowling and Warner Bros., which produces the Potter movies, filed suit to stop Vander Ark and RDR from selling the book. Late last week, RDR agreed to halt publication of Vander Ark’s Potter lexicon pending a federal judge’s review.
In her suit, Rowling, arguably the most well-remunerated writer in history, asserts complete and total control over the Harry Potter creative universe — a stance that, if affirmed by the court, would strike a deep blow to the legions of fans who have added immeasurably to her work online. Her attorneys claim that Vander Ark’s book will compete with Rowling’s own planned Potter encyclopedia; the lexicon, they say, is thus nothing more than an attempt to “make millions of dollars off the back of Ms. Rowling’s creativity.”
In a statement, Rowling added: “It is not reasonable, or legal, for anybody, fan or otherwise, to take an author’s hard work, re-organize their characters and plots, and sell them for their own commercial gain. However much an individual claims to love somebody else’s work, it does not become theirs to sell.”
Has J.K. Rowling ever been to a library? Seriously, I truly wonder. Because if she had, she might have seen many examples of exactly the sort of books she describes as “not reasonable.” For instance, a list of the allusions in “Ulysses”; or a complete guide to all of the characters in William Faulkner’s fiction; or a compilation and detailed analysis of Bob Dylan’s lyrics; or a book containing the complete chronology of the events in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.”
Hey, J.K. — can I call you J.K.? — these are known as “reference books,” and, like the HPL, they are not mere “reorganizations” of characters and plots.
We don’t know about you, but we think that if the woman used the site to help her write the damn books, they’re obviously useful reference tools and are protected under fair use, which doesn’t distinguish between the commercial and non-commercial. Even if J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. wishes that it did.
J.K. Rowling’s Crucio curse on fan’s Harry Potter book [Machinist]
(Photo:Getty)
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It makes sense, they should have asked her for her approval before making that book.
Writing a commentary or criticism on a book or character doesnt count…
Sure is a lot of anger shown in these comments towards someone no one posting here actually knows (I assume…).
If she HADN’T made bajillions of dollars on these books, and had just made a modest sum of money, would you people still be saying such hateful things like “money-grubbing bitch”? If YOU do something one day that makes you crazy rich, can we assume that anything you do after that point that relates to you making money is because you’re greedy and evil and horrible?
Seems pretty childish to me. Cry more, noobs.
When I first heard about this I was on Steve Vander Ark’s side, until I found out that the book is quite probably including essays others wrote for the Lexicon website, without getting permission from those authors to publish their work.
And it is kind of shady when you consider that he DID ask her if it was okay and she said no.
Ever heard of Cole’s Notes? I don’t see how this is any different than those types of publications.
@stanfrombrooklyn: Word. You took the words right out of my mouth.
Amazing amount of class envy in the original post and comments. How in the world does the amount of money the woman has made have anything to do with the copyright issue she is asking a court to decide?
Let the jealousy go for a minute folks. A copyright becomes invalid once the owner no longer makes reasonable attempts to protect it.
Has this place turned from consumerist into communist?
In the end, if the book is just a restatement of things that can be found in the HP books, but written as a reference source, then there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it. This has been done thousands of times before with other book series – Lord of the Rings for example.
And for anyone stating that Rowling created the universe from scratch hasn’t read much or even watched many movies. Rent the Worst Witch if you can find it. Read a bunch of mythology and see if many of the elements look familiar. Rowling’s original input in the series is very limited. She just repackaged a bunch of stories and myths. If she managed to make money off of that, more power (or money) to her. But if she tries to keep other people from trying to make money off of her creations, then all the dead storytellers of the past need to come back to life and sue Rowling for making money off of their ideas.
@wring: Oh yes, how greedy of her to publish Harry Potter books just for charity!
I doubt it is JK herself that is against it, it is more likely her publishing company. Since they aren’t going to have any more cashcow HP books coming, a reference book by JK will be the next best thing for them.
@Danilo Campos: Copyright law trumps greed and facts aren’t copyrightable.
@Buran: he’s right, though – they aren’t objective “facts” – she made all this shit up. This isn’t a phone book. It’s only in the past 20 years that commercial use wasn’t presumptively unfair, and now it has to be mitigated by being parody, criticism, or for some (not even all) levels of education use. The Justice O’Connor’s Feist Publicatons decision from 1991 puts something, even a lexicon, derived from Rowling’s work outside of the realm of “facts”: The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice.”
If fair use is the defense they’re going for, it’s probably not going to work.
@dorianh49: I think JK was once a man, until she cut off her Harry Peepee. This is money grubbing plain and simple.
If The HP Lexicon relied on armies of contributors, including contributors that created original works in the form of critique & commentary, where are their shares of the publishing deal? Or is the site owner – morally if not legally due to squirelly legalese buried on the HPL site – stealing their intellectual property. Absconding with it and walking arm-in-arm with the publisher, laughing, to the bank.
It removes a great deal of their supposed innocent-little-guy status if so. Which I’m 99.9% sure it is.
Lot’s of armchair lawyering going on here (and elsewhere) and the term ‘fair-use’ getting thrown around quite a bit. As already pointed out above pretty clear that the original poster either knows that US law doesn’t apply in the suit and the local law is different w/r/t fair use.
Another poster adds “A copyright becomes invalid once the owner no longer makes reasonable attempts to protect it.” – also not true under US law and most likely confusing trademark with copyright.
@dorianh49: You win the internets.
Yes, all those “statements” really sound like she wrote them. I’m sure the publisher is making her do this.
Copyright is appauling these days, copyright should no longer apply to anything except near exact duplicates that are attempting to counterfeit themselves as the orginal works.
I feel this way and im a software engineer supposedly something hinges on copyright and I absolutely disagree.
I hate this woman, she is a terrible person. I refuse to ever read her books because she’s an uninteligent bum. For those who made the comments about communism? This woman wrote her orginal books while being on state paid aid in england for being a bum. I sure hope she paid back all the money gave her.
@mechanismatic: “Rent the Worst Witch if you can find it.”
DUDE — BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
Creepy Worst Witch Tim Curry in my childhood TOTALLY prepared me for Rocky Horror Picture Show Tim Curry in my teen years.
But yes, for sure appears to be a major influence on the HP books.
@theninjasquad, @Buran, @Xerloq: OMG!
The encyclopedia she’s writing is for charity!
The encyclopedia she’s writing is for charity!
The encyclopedia she’s writing is for charity!
The encyclopedia she’s writing is for charity!
In what universe is giving to charity greedy? Please explain this to me! I suppose you expect me to believe that she wrote Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard out of greed too?
The HP Lexicon isn’t just an encyclopedia- the site itself had copied information directly from the books, including lengthy quotes. JKR and her people sued because they had no idea what was going to be in the books- whether it would be commentary and essays, or if it would be the that was on the website. They sent repeated requests to RDR publishing to get a copy of the manuscript, and were repeatedly refused. JKR has allowed many books about Harry Potter, but they’ve been more essays and criticisms. Reportedly, Vander Ark asked permission to publish this book, and JKR refused it, and he went ahead anyway.
I’m all for fair use, but this is really pushing it. The web site is free, and makes no (or very little) money. I can’t see any author allowing someone else to profit off of their characters- not to mention the contributors to the website who are getting nothing from the book.
The Machinist article is a really poor examination of the legal issues involved.
@camille_javal: Thank you for pointing this out. If you are going to write a blog, get your facts straight.
@Buran: You are correct, facts are not. This is from the copyright website of the US government. “Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author.”
Simply reorganizing a story into a reference book introduces no new material. These are not facts, these are items from a copyrighted story. She made it all up.
Lastly, PLEASE, for the love of humanity, before any uses the phrase “Fair Use” again in a post, please, please, please, research it. I do not mean wiki either. Go look at the text of the law and then see examples of cases to see how the criteria were weighed. One of the most frustrating things on this web site is that whenever there is a copyright issue posters start pulling Fair Use out and use it as some sort of imaginary catch all that allows all sorts of things to be done with copyrighted work. If you look, you will find that it is much more narrowly construed that many of you seem to think.
hmmmm so it turns out she’s a greedy bitch after all! Who’d a thunk it.
There aren’t any ‘facts’ in the lexicon. It is a collection of trivia derivative of JK Rowling’s work. Her work is not in the public domain, and examples such as Ulysses are not relevant because these entered the public domain long ago.
I cannot write an encyclopedia of everything Star Wars, publish it, then not expect to be sued by LucasFilm. Even if George Lucas loves my fan site the most, the minute I start making money off of it, that is when he is ‘losing’ money in his view if I’m not forced to publish through him since he owns the IP.
Wow another lawsuit from Ms. Rowling…I think she is long overdue to beging getting over herself.
If everyone would just stop and reread that article, I think it would make more sense.
She is in the process of publishing her own encyclopedia FOR CHARITY.
If this book is allowed to be published, it will compete against her own encyclopedia, therefore taking money away from the CHARITY.
She is definitely not a greedy-bitch. She gives to countless charities all the time.
@mcjake: Exactly the point. While I think this is slightly ridiculous, she’s SAYING that the book would hurt the sales of a book she is already writing, whose proceeds would go to charity.
Which is a legit claim, actually. I wouldn’t go for it, but she has a leg to stand on. She is not saying it would do anything to the books that are OUT, but the one that is forthcoming.
@meiran: Legally, however, you can’t crush legal competition just because you don’t like the fact that they’re not kissing babies. You may post on your website that you’re “disappointed” that they aren’t helping you, or whatever, but that’s like bitching that the MS Zune is stealing potential donations away from the “Product Red” iPods via lost sales. You can bitch all you want but Microsoft is legally in the clear to sell a competitor to your charity-tied product.
@Daniel-Bham: You can, actually, write that encyclopedia. It’s a fact that “Coruscant, according to the Star Wars universe, is a planet located near the inner core of a galaxy. It has been under development for so long that the entire surface of the planet, except for one token small park, is covered by a massive city.”
That is a factual statement and is not copyrightable, and if I desire to do so I can publish a book that includes it. I can also publish other related facts in my book.
I can’t invent new places, characters, things, etc. but I can make true statements about what is already there.
@mbbilder: Because a fact is a fact and isn’t copyrightable and because this is an abuse of the law for profit that is harming the public by denying them choices?
@Javert: A “new version” would be a new story using characters that she created, or the universe that she created. Facts about what’s already been written are just facts.
However, you are right in that I can’t figure out where fair use comes into play here. This is a debate about how something not copyrightable is suddenly trying to be swept under the copyright rug (something MLB tried, and failed, to do) because someone doesn’t like the fact that there’s now competition and they aren’t free anymore to monopolize whatever market there may be for this sort of reference work.
@Rectilinear Propagation: Giving to charity isn’t greedy.
Trying to stop someone from doing something that is completely legal, because you want to keep all the profit for yourself, is.
@Danilo Campos: Except when the law says that you don’t get to choose, e.g. when someone compiles a list of uncopyrightable facts.
@Rectilinear Propagation: I think that was a joke, given there aren’t any more books to buy.
@Rectilinear Propagation: she’s already made hella money and she already stopped writing the books. I say she should just retire a la JD Salinger/Thomas Pynchon and be removed from the public eye altogether. She has enough money, and more, to spend within her and her children’s lifetime.
Reference books like this are published all the time, typically under an “unofficial” moniker. Sometimes the author goes after them legally, an is usually happy with a licensing fee or a royalty residual from the book sales. In this case, JK is being proactive because she has a similar book planned. Said book will most likely sell out very quickly, and she probably wants people to wait for a 2nd edition, rather than buy this alternative title.
What’s the difference between something like this and another compendium (eg. Robin Furth’s encyclopedia of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series)? Money.
Whereas Furth’s book sold very well, King wasn’t the author. Rowling has the fanbase to sell millions more, especially if her name is on the book.
Personally, I think that all this move will do is alienate her fan base. It might put a slight dent in book sales. That dent would probably be less than the dent from letting this other encyclopedia hit the racks.
@Buran: So then you agree that she isn’t being greedy then! Excellent!
@wring: Obviously she hasn’t stopped writing books in the Harry Potter universe if she’s just published The Tales of Beedle the Bard and is currently working on an encyclopedia.
For anyone actually interested in this issue, http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org has a full timeline and outline of the lawsuit including the attempts made by JKR and Warner Bros. prior to filing.
Also- The Tales of Beadle the Bard are not being published. One is being auctioned for charity and the other 6 were given away as personal books.
And for those whose response is that she is being greedy- all proceeds from her “companion” books (Quidditch through the Ages and Magical Creatures and where to Find them) Are donated to charity as well.
Not only given to charity, but charities that help kids.
So it’s stealing from poor children. Nice.
Sure, the proceeds will go to the kids…after the publisher takes a nice chunk out.
Hm. The Lexicon complied with the other for-charity books by not posting the information contained in them on the website. If you wanted to know about a Fantastic Beast, you had to buy the book. Why the sudden change to infringing on the for-charity encyclopedia? Maybe the issue has gone from the hands of the Lexicon owners and into the hands of their greedy publisher and lawyer.
@CaffeinatedSquint: But that happens all the time, and by reasonably well known authors. Wicked by Gregory Maguire is Wizard of Oz fanfic. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fford is Austen fanfic. There are plenty of non-canon Buffy fanfic books on the market, and I’m sure the same is true for many television series. Clearly, publishing fanfic isn’t the be-all-end-all evil that some publishers might claim, because their companies are publishing plenty of work that is derivitive and rightfully should be called fanfic.
I hope she gets her butt kicked in court.