Slashdot Mirror
Harry Potter's 'Half Blood Prince' Leaked
darkonc writes "The CBC is reporting that about 15 copies of "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" were accidently sold at a 'Great Canadien Superstore' in a suburb of Vancouver BC. The Canadian Distributor, Raincoast Books managed to get
an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them and demanding that they return the books to Raincoast until Friday. To add a carrot to the stick, raincoast is offering various goodies including a signed bookplate."
Raincoast Books managed to get an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them and demanding that they return the books to Raincoast until Friday. To add a carrot to the stick, raincoast is offering various goodies including a signed bookplate.
Are they actually tracking people down or is this just a protective injection? TFI says "The Court Order also requires anyone who has a copy or copies of the book to return them to Raincoast immediately." That doesn't seem very enforceable.
Of course I'd return my copy for a signed bookplate in a heartbeat. Still the paranoid part of me thinks this is yet another reason to pay for everything with cash and ditch the debit card. I wonder what the legal/financial repercussions for the store will be? TFI/TFA didn't dwell on that. Will the store be sued for breach of contract or will Raincoast consider it an honest mistake? How many poor bastards will be fired by the store in an attempt to cover managements ass?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Scholastic won't be very happy about this...
This stuff is starting to get ridiculous. It's a book FFS, not an issue of national security!
...to publish the first and last chapters.
Using ROT13 encoding.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Somebody at the GameFAQs.com forum claims to already have the book, and has supposedly posted content from it.
o ard=245&topic=22104343&page=0
http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/genmessage.php?b
This leak would lend credence to his claims that he does already have access to the book.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
So "Real Canadian Superstore" (CBC article) is the same as "Great Canadien Superstore" (/. submission)? No, really. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm curious.
Raincoast Books managed to get an injunction prohibiting the people who recieved the books from talking about them
O.K., so from now on I'm no longer going to listen to any more crap from any of you Canadian Slashdotters criticizing free speech in America.
(Now watch the Kanucks and Newfies mod me into oblivion!)
World's tallest building rises in the desert
Literature for 10 year olds is "leaked"! Now the kids will have no interest in reading! When I was 10, I never read a book that was older than 3 days. Someone has to pay for this.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Hermione grows up.
I'm sorry, but how do you prohibit the sale or providing information about a book that you PURCHASED, regardless of the date it's supposed to be released?
Am I missing something, or does that seem even more retarded than something our court systems would do?
Blake
How do you think a book store "accidentally" sold 15 copies of a book that was widely publicized to be released at a later date? And if they accidentally released it early, why did only 15 copies sell?
XaNk: now I remember why I hated the girls in high school
XaNk: because none of them would talk to me
Seriously, if I were the employee who screwed this up, I'd sleep with a pistol underneath my pillow. Everybody knows the big boss man isn't too forgiving of fuck ups like this.
Oh, wait... Harry Potter books? I thought we were talking about an international shipment of premium grade heroin.
Who the fuck cares about some Harry Potter books coming out a little early?
They should have used magic ink
Canadian SWAT and amry units are mobilizing in an effort to avert catastrophe. It is reported that at this very minute someone somewhere could very well be peacefully sitting in a chair with a cup of coffee reading this book illegally. It could be a family member, your best friend, or anyone. Citizens should keep their eyes pealed for any suspicious characters with gleeful smiles on their faces -- seemingly lost in an imaginary world -- that might be concealing the illicit material beneath their clothing.
It was just uploaded on http://oink.me.uk/ as a pdf... I could really care less about it though...
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Which explains why he had only half his blood....
Yes, yes I'll be here all week...
...let us say I (A) have an unpublished work, and someone (B) gets hold of a copy of my work, then sells it to a third party (C). While C might have acted in good faith, A can still use the courts to make sure his unpublished work isn't de facto published without consent.
Replace A with Mrs. Rowling, B with the bookstore and C with the lucky buyer. I imagine the bookstore does not have authorization to sell it until the release date, and so the book is in legal terms still considered unpublished. Unpublished works have great protection in copyright law, as they should have.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If they don't stack the deck in favor of the small stores they cut their own throats long-term.
this one wasn't listed under IT and Security
This comment contained copyrighted text and was removed at the request of the copyright owner under the terms of the DMCA.
Is a 'Great Canadien Superstore' kind of like Costco, only their shelves are lined with female Canadians of every type imaginable? Or would those be "Canadiennes"?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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Distributors used to hold shiping books until the release, so store got their copies and could sell them the same day. The problem is shipping problems/delays meant some stores go their copies early and some got theirs late. The stores that got them late lost out on a lot of sales, and stores that got them early quickly sold out. So the solution is the stores enter into a voluntary agreement (if they do not agree the books arent shipped until after the release date) that they recieve it early, so shipping problems/delays can be fixed before release, and they hold the books until the release date. The arrangement benefits the store more then the publisher (the publisher generally makes the same amount of money no matter which particular store sells it) and customers who can depend on their favorite store having it on release day. Of course some people break the agreement through greed or just by accident and the publisher does it's best to minimize the damage. These agreements aren't oppressive schemes by the publishers, they actually benefit everyone. Stores that don't like it can take their chances.
But its not really a Constitutional issue. The vast majority of the law isn't, really. Constitutional issues just engage law review writers and producers of Law and Order because they're a lot sexier than the law of torts and state definitions of what exactly constitutes a sale (sample controversy: Bob makes an oral agreement to Sue that he will give her his copy of Harry Potter after it comes out if she goes on a date with him on Thursday. On Friday, after the date, Bob takes delivery of Harry Potter from UPS a day earlier than it should have arrived, reads it, and is disgusted to find that he ordered the English edition and has extraneous u's all over his book. Forgetting his earlier agreement with Sue, he burns the book in disgust. Does Sue sue for breach of contract, non-delivery of goods, or damage to her property? Answer: go to law school.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Does this strike anybody else as more than a bit creepy? Ok, fine, the kiddies don't get to hang on to their precious prerelease copies, whatever. But, a court imposed gag order? They sell me something, in error. They then have an injunction put out ordering me to return it and forbidding me to talk about any part of it, presumably under some sort of penalty? WTF?
It'll be a lovely day indeed when the DRM enthusiasts we know and love from the electronics world start doing this. Hey kid, is that PSP hackable? Report to the distribution center for immediate impound of noncompliant device; a compliance officer(courtesy of Uncle Sam) will be along to assist you shortly.
Its a real shame, there doesn't seem to be a bittorrent for physical objects...
Nope. Amazon.com posted three of the chapter titles. Chapter Two: "Spinners End" Chapter Six: "Draco's Detour" Chapter Fourteen: "Felix Felicis" This is consistent with the chapter titles posted in GameFAQs.
In Canada, Raincoast Books has the contract. So I'm not sure the Scholastic covenant applies. Raincoast publishes many books, but they're still fairly small in the publishing world. And Superstore is probably a major account -- it would be risky to refuse to sell any books to them.
-- SYS 64738 --
You may want to check your own law. A work is not considered published until it has been published in some form. That it has been printed with the intent to publish is not sufficient. You may also want to read Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. The Nation Enters for a ruling by the Supreme court where the Nation obtained a printed copy of Ford's memoairs before release, much like this case.
You may note that a) it is considered unpublished, despite having changed hands because it was not officially published and b) the Supreme courts holds that the "right of first publication" counts extremely strongly against fair use. That means that the people who have recieved the book have no right to quote even small bits. The Nation used 300 to 400 words. So I wouldn't be so cocky if I were you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Over in the real world, it's beginning to look like the source of the Valerie Plume leak was Karl Rove.
I can't fathom why anyone would think these are the first 15 copies that have been taken.
These books are sitting in the back of thousands of stores across the world. Does anybody seriously believe that not a single stockboy managed to get into the box? No bookstore owners or managers thought they'd get a head start on the book?
Yeah, I know steps were taken, but come on. Nothing described there was magic.
I've read a lot of negative comments about the Harry Potter series here, and even more 12 hours ago when the story was on fark, but for all of you who haven't had a chance or desire to read one of the books, stop by the local library and give one a chance.
The stories are not high-brow literature, nor are they intended to be. They are, however, good fantasy. The storylines are entertaining, and they have a fair bit of depth to them. The world is also deep, and pretty self-consistent. The books are humerous on many levels, and also at times a bit more insiteful than they are perhaps given credit for. A lot of the themes that started to emerge in Order of the Phoenix, and that will likely escellate in Half-blood Prince are especially pertinent today. (Although perhaps the death-eater/nazi comparison is more obvious, there are subtle but interesting parallels between the situation with voldamot and his followers and more modern things such as terrorism.) The books contain interesting moral delimas and gray areas (the position of the house elves, S.P.E.W and the take of the other characters offers interesting parallels to the philosophy of neitzsche for example) and are also just plain a lot of fun.
I think the biggest problem with the Harry Potter series is that a lot of people will overlook it BECAUSE it's so popular. I know that I avoid things that are fairly popular because I think that in general the masses have terrible taste, and if most people like something, then I'll probably think it's crap. Luckily I did check out Harry Potter and found that in this case, the public was right, the books are good, and maybe other people who have avoided it for the same reason might find that they too enjoy the stories.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Probably the greater danger is unscrupulous parents trying to make a few thousand out of it by stealing the book from the kid and offering it for sale to the highest bidder. It is my guess that this is actually what the injunction is trying to stop, as that's detectable and tracable,
AND PERFECTLY LEGAL. I wouldn't hesitate to put it up on ebay. If the publisher wants to keep it off the market, all they have to do is be the highest bidder.
The UCC only applies to transactions conducted between a business and another business, not a business and an individual.
Dead wrong. The UCC applies, in part i.e., Article 2, to commercial transactions. Some provisions are specifically targeted to merchant-to-merchant transactions, e.g., Section 2-201(2), but typically the provisions apply to party-to-party transactions, where the UCC defines parties as: a person that has engaged in a transaction or made an agreement subject to [the Uniform Commercial Code]. From Sec 1-201.
As for your statement regarding $500, this is also horribly wrong. You are thinking of the statute of frauds, which requires a transaction for an amount or value over $500 to be committed to writing (see 2-201 above). It is designed to prevent fraud when people are contracting for things of large value (whereas transactions with smaller values may be enforced if there is only an oral contract).
Please, google is your friend. The knowledge of law on slashdot is bad enough without comments like that mucking it up more. I'd be less harsh if you had spent the time to do a little research before hitting reply.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Oh! Oh! Me too! Here goes:
1. Pupkins and the Warblesnarker
2. Pupkins meets his DOOOM!
3. Pupkins and the snupkins
3. Harry meets Pupkins
4. Pupkins meets his DOOOM! revisited
5. Harry meets his DOOOM!
6. Hermione meets Harry's DOOOM!
7. Hagrid gets Sloshed
8. Hagrid meets his parents
9. Hagrid meets his DOOOM!
10. Pupkins strikes back
11. Flubugern drives the hollyhock
12. Herk smacks Hagrid with a fish
13. The Verisimilator
14. The lint remover
15. Hagrid beats Harry with a smock
16. Hagrid apologizes in the nude
17. Harry kisses Hagrid accidentally
18. Frumpalorn engorges Dundathor with an Archaeopteryx
19. Bimballon disgorges an Apteryx into Harry's Christmas stocking
20. No More Wimbledoots!
21. The Wozzlies get Trashed
22. Harry and the evil menace of badness and evil
23. Harry and the evilorn menacorn of baddnessalorn
24. Death to the smilies
25. Reflective Slapping Contest
26. Tournament of the Snail Lord
27. The Final Finality of DOOOM!
28. Pupkins gets beaten with a tire iron
29. Hermione gets sloshed
30. Froophthet and Znoosed
31. Harry goes on the rampage
32. Happy Iron Kettle and the Twisted Wrench
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Not for millions of books to thousands of locations on the same day. (Just think of it as a paper version of the Slashdot effect.)
Witness the other side of the coin of free markets. While they create wealth and provide incentives for creativity and business sense, they also create some artifical and nonsensical rules. Time-to-market is one of those. We've seen it in the warez scene 15 years ago, when 0-day cracks were magically more valued even though the usual communication channels (disks copied on the school yard) were too slow to make an actual difference between a 0-day and a +3-day. And due to availability and timezones, it wasn't much of an indicator for skill, either (not to mention that a good portion of the 0-day cracks sucked and needed to be fixed with a later release).
Forward to 2005. Movie release dates have been crucial for a few years already, even though for all practical purposes it makes no difference. Now book release dates enter the picture. Again, no difference except for the marketing pressure that the free market has created, where immediacy is somehow a value, even where it has no actual usefulness.
So why does it matter? Because the market says it does. No other reason at all. If the king doesn't like red then you don't dress in red. If the market says (via marketing people, its inofficial spokespersons) that it's important, then you obey and the ridiculousness of it all will not become aparent until the king has fallen and our children all wonder why their ancestors didn't see that he wasn't really a god.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"More Questions then Answers" needs a comma in the middle, and indicates narration of events in time (first more questions, then answers). "More Questions than Answers" means the number of questions was greater than the number of answers. Always use than for comparisons, kids. Incidentally, you probably meant "preliminary injunction" rather than "protective injection".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Yes, yes I'll be here all week...
You misspelled "I'll get my coat"
VOLDEMORT: Dumbledore never told you about your father, did he?
HARRY: Nooooooo! It's not true!
HARRY leaps from the battlements of Hogwarts but is rescued by a passing Quidditch player. After having his hand magically regrown by MADAME POMFREY, he tries to get it on with CHO CHANG, not realising at this point that she is in fact his twin sister.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Most of this is going to sound redundant, but I'm something of an insider for Barnes & Noble at least so maybe someone will find this enlightening.
The book IS going to be hugely popular. Nobody is denying that. And 15 leaked copies on the other side of the world aren't going to hurt any of your local bookstores.
BUT... Harry Potter is huge. Many B&N stores are receiving 4 times as many copies as are reserved, and the number of reserved copies per store is freakin' huge. Keep in mind some stores are getting considerably more than just 4 times as many. When the book goes on sale at midnight, stores will be in the midst of a whole Harry Potter festival of sorts - games and activies based on the books, other areas of the stores (music) will be closed, etc etc. The book is going at 40% off, and it's expected to sell out almost instantly regardless of the seemingly obscene number of books being shipped. We're talking multicolored wristbands designate lines that stretch outside of stores, fire marshall occupancy limits (which doesn't happen too often in the bookstore world), and full staffs working into the wee hours of the morning and starting again the next day.. The release of this book is as big as Star Wars, and I don't say that jokingly.
So back to the problem - it's been said many times already that if the strict on sale dates didn't exist, some stores would get crushed and others reap huge rewards based purely on shipping or handling that may or may not have been under their control. Imagine if Star Wars was slated for 8 theaters in your area, but only 2 of them had it for the first 2 weeks - that would have huge effects on those theaters for a long time to come. Same idea. I won't even get into the price premium that could be charged by the few stores that, by chance, got HP early.
So for those 15 leaked copies on the other side of the world, in and of themselves they are a non-issue. However, if nothing is done, it sets a precedent for the strict on sale date being unimportant, and then you've got the fiasco mentioned above, and THAT is why they can't be ignored.
Of course there are marketing and hype concerns, that's a given, but this is much about protections for stores (of all sizes) as anything else.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
Leaked copies of a book doesn't make a difference in book sales. Of those 15 copies, what odds do you have of someone actually reading the whole thing (remember the thing is mainly targeted at young readers and likely multiple readers per copy) in those 4 days? It's not anything like the movie analogy you gave because a movie is a fixed amount of time and seeing it early does make a difference. You see a movie and invest a whole 2-3 hours and you're done. Four days early would be a huge difference for the theaters that get stiffed. If you start selling books a couple days early, you run out a couple days early and people go elsewhere. It happens all the time: Item A goes on sale at store B and sells out. People start saying "They have it over at store C" rinse, lather, repeat. I say sell it when you get it, pay more for faster shipping, get bigger profits if you can manage to keep the thing on your shelves. Power to the smart people, not just to the ones playing in the artificially level playing field.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
This court order would be manifestly illegal, and henceforth void.
All of this shit just because Hermione finally dies in this book.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I agree the security around the release of a children's book is inane. It seems solely designed to create hype about the security itself.
And doesn't anyone think that the small "leak" might itself be a publicity stunt, to get another few front page articles on CNN? That is far more valuable monetarily than the cost of any supposed leak. And showing the publishers doing good by offering signed copies, also adds to the PR.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Injunctions, in my jurisdiction, need a binomial to be issued: fumus bono iuris (the "smoke" of the good right) and periculum in mora (danger in delaying).
In casu, none of those are present.
There is no periculum in mora, because no irreparable damage will come from people discussing the book, or doing anything that would be legal anyway about it (if the book sucks, people will find out soon enough anyway).
There is no fumus bono iuris because third-party bona fide buyers are exempt from problems ocurring upstream in the distribution chain. For the love of $DEITY, if I enter a big bookstore, buy a book and pay with my credit card it's assumed that I thought in good faith that it was legal to buy that book. The first sale doctrine makes it legal any licit use of the book, even if the book was sold to me in breach of contract. And no, the book is not a stolen good. If I had bought the book from the back of a van, then it could be.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Raincoast books is the Canadian publisher of Harry Potter, and has nothing to do with Scholastic, the American publisher.
Speaking of which, why is it that the American versions contain different text than the ROTW (Rest of the World) version? I mean, even the title of the first book is different between the British/Canadian/Aussie version and the American edition -- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the US. The Philosopher's Stone is well-known, and changing the title to The Sorcerer's Stone seems odd.
That wasn't so much insightful as wishful thinking on the part of someone who isn't a manager.
We used to have a culture where management never took any heat for anything, which was a bad thing. But expecting someone to take responsibility for something they had no realistic knowledge of or control over (and expecting managers to supervise all staff all the time in case someone makes one little mistake is just that situation) then holding them accountable is as absurd as any other feel-good political correctness, and about as constructive.
I'm not a manager, BTW, just a guy who believes in credit where it's due and not assigning blame randomly just because something went wrong.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I know, that word doesn't mean what I think it means, but still... what legal theory supports preventing someone who bought a book in good faith without engaging in any agreement (or even reading a notice) to keep the details of the book secret from talking about what they read?
I don't see how they can possibly do anything to the people who bought the book. (besides attempt to bribe them) It was legally sold to them, in good faith, with no agreement of any kind, other than "you give me book, I give you money." Even if they did have your name from a credit card recipt, they shouldn't be able to to jack about it, and if they tried, they should be on the receiving end of a harassment lawsuit.
The only ones legally liable are the stores that sold copies early, who have broken a written agreement with the publisher. (they should...er... get the book thrown at them?)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Doesn't anyone see this as particularly fascist? Businesses are supposed to be our SERVANTS, not the other way around. We PAY THEM for goods and services and they bend over backwards to earn their pay. Sadly, this dynamic has been damaged. Capitalism has failed in exactly the same way that communism did. (Note: I'm not a communist) Communism fell apart because some "pigs were more equal than others". It would appear that this same rot has happened within the capitalist system. Some "pigs (Bill Gates, Dick Cheney, Darl McBride, Martha Stewart, the Walton/Wal-mart family) are more equal than others (YOU)". Wake up people. You're being screwed by the bouncing smiley face at Wal-mart.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
That's assuming that the book store owned the books that they sold. The publisher could have written a contract that said that they owned the books until the official retail distribution date, at which point ownership transfers to the retailer.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Despite the tremendous lockdown effots, these books got into the wild. To quote one of the people in Jurassic Park: "Life found a way."
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I learned from the **AA and SCO
You don't buy a book, you buy the permission to read it.
[;-)]
"Yeah, and the Big Mac is the best selling meal in America."
My favorite: "Budweiser is the best-selling beer in America, by a long shot."
Harry Potter is more like Guinness. Not necessarily the best, but damned good.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
How you doin' with those thetans, Tom? Give my regards to Xenu when your head finally explodes from all the mental dissonance.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sorry but that doesn't change the fact that the current book buyers bought the books in good faith. They rendered payment and recieved the goods. The relationship between the book store and the distributor has no effect on the transaction. Let's take a hypothetical.
Book Seller A goes bankrupt. The distributor is owed hundred of thousands of dollars. Can they go after the customers? No. Because the customers acted in good faith and purchased the items.
Read the Uniform Commercial Code to understand what constitutes a sale.
Thalasar
Note the axiom on Slashdot.
"News for the Nerds. Stuff that matters."
In modern society, any activity that doesn't involve holding a footlong ball while smacking your body against another, or lying through your teeth, or lobbying government to enrich yourself, is considered nerdy.
Book reader are all nerds. Except those who read sex stories, they're normal.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
"I can appreciate a good story, but I appreciate a well-written one more. Harry Potter is a guilty pleasure, like the trashy cyberpunk novels I sometimes read..."
There's a time and a place (in my diet) for fillet steak and another time and place for a hotdog.
Why should reading matter be any different?
T&K.
Political language