JK Rowling sues publisher for attempting to print fans Harry Potter encyclopedia

JK Rowling outside of federal court today.
JK Rowling is suing RDR books for attempting to publish a print version of a popular Harry Potter fan website, The Harry Potter Lexicon. The suit was filed last year and Rowling will be in U.S. District Court for hearings this week.

Rowling herself is a big fan of the site, and she even wrote on her website in 2004 that she used the Harry Potter Lexicon site to fact check her own work. Selling an encyclopedia that would include many of her own definitions for such things she invented for the Harry Potter series as spells, potions, magical creatures, Quidditch rules and wizarding history would be an extreme copyright violation, she contends, and is much different than a website. Her lawyer says that she personally compared the lexicon to her work and is prepared to testify about the similarities.

The author of the intended Harry Potter encyclopedia, 50 year-old former teacher and librarian Steven Vander Ark, says that he was initially reluctant to publish the book due to the copyright issues. He had the publisher include a section in his contract that they would provide free legal assistance as well as pay for any damages if a lawsuit was brought against him.

Lawyers for the publishing company are not fighting the copyright claim, but plan to defend that the Encyclopedia is legal because it’s for research or another “greater purpose”:

One of [Rowling’s] lawyers, Dan Shallman, on Friday told Judge Robert P. Patterson, who is hearing the trial without a jury, that Rowling “feels like her words were stolen.”

He said the author felt so personally violated that she made her own comparisons among her seven best-selling novels and the lexicon and was ready to testify about the similarities in dozens of instances.

David Saul Hammer, a lawyer for RDR Books, which plans to sell the lexicon, said the publisher will not challenge the claim by Rowling that much of the material in the lexicon infringed her copyrights.

But the judge will decide whether the use of the material by the small Muskegon, Mich., publisher was legal because it was used for some greater purpose, such as a scholarly pursuit.

In court papers filed prior to the trial, Rowling said she was “deeply troubled” by the book.

“If RDR’s position is accepted, it will undoubtedly have a significant, negative impact on the freedoms enjoyed by genuine fans on the Internet,” she said. “Authors everywhere will be forced to protect their creations much more rigorously, which could mean denying well-meaning fans permission to pursue legitimate creative activities.”

[From The Huffington Post]

I read all the Harry Potter books, but I’m not a huge fan and I kind of took them at face value and never tried to dig deeper into the very engaging world Rowling created. You can see how fans would want to get into the fine details of the books and how an encyclopedia of all of the items and history could serve that purpose. That should be Rowling’s decision to put something like that for profit, though. She was supportive of this website until they tried to turn it into a book that would infringe on her ideas and writing, and she has every right to sue to stop its publication.

Update: According to BBC News, Rowling plans to write her own Harry Potter encyclopedia.

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