Rowling Sues over Harry Potter Lexicon

According to Bloomberg news, J.K. Rowling, internationally acclaimed author of the hugely popular "Harry Potter" series, is involved in yet another court battle. In this case, RDR books, a Michigan-based publishing company and Steve Vander Ark, webmaster for one of the multitude of fan sites that have popped up regarding Harry, are being sued to stop them from publishing a lexicon based on the Potter series. Although Rowling gave a great deal of leeway for fan sites to discuss her books, the publication for profit of this lexicon galled her enough to file suit.

Rowling involvement in a great number of court battles over the Harry Potter series is testimony to the sheer power of the dollar. Arguments on the Internet abound regarding the validity to all of them, and this is one of the more controversial ones. While publications of lexicons similar to this exist for most other series of this caliber, Rowling's case is unique in that the author is both still alive and still publishing. She claims that she had planned to publish a lexicon of her own and donate the proceeds to charity.

This is far from being a cut and dry case. Rowling obviously owns the rights to the Harry Potter name and characters, but the Fair Use Act in America states that use of character names and sources is legal if it is used for literary discourse. The concern on that side is that, by setting a court precedent of allowing the author to maintain absolute and total control over publication of material related to his or her work, literary discourse materials, including lexicons for other works, might be severely limited. My first instinct is that Rowling absolutely maintains those rights, and that the negative repercussions of allowing people to publish materials unrelated to their own original works is a serious determent to copyright law. The thievery outweighs the literary discourse, as it were.

However, on further speculation, the determent to literary discourse cannot be shoved to the side. If every author (or at least every author's estate) owns absolute rights to the material, and it cannot be discussed, where does that stop? Will some particularly lofty-minded author attempt to sue professors over the use of their poetry in a college classroom? One of the most resolute rulings of copyright law is that a person ought to maintain rights to their own work.

Ultimately, the question comes down to how much Steve Vander Ark "lifted." A lexicon in its truest sense should inform and engage the reader about the work in question. It should not serve as a stand-in or a cheat sheet to the work as a whole. It should not offer speculation that falls outside of the bounds of the work itself.

Rowling stated, according to Bloomberg, that she was particularly disgruntled at the lack of quotation marks around quoted materials, and continued on to say that she felt that the lexicon unduly drew from directly quoted materials.

Attempting to obtain a profit from someone else's work is very much what the laws are intended to prevent. Since this case is less than obvious, I feel that the ability to ascertain the "correct" party in this case is nearly impossible, without knowing for sure how much of Rowling's work was directly lifted.

Common knowledge states that a writer may use another writer's words in moderation if and only if there is some ability to tell which words were not original. This is usually done by use of quotation marks or italicized text. If Steve Vander Ark followed this rule of thumb, the law seems to be on his side. If he did not, the law seems to be on Rowling's. The courts will decide.