Orson Scott Card Blasts J.K. Rowling's Lawsuit

Wanker writes "In the wake of a lawsuit by J.K. Rowling against the author of a Harry Potter encyclopedia, the Greensboro Rhino Times has an article by Orson Scott Card blasting J.K. Rowling for 'letting herself be talked into being outraged over a perfectly normal publishing activity.' Orson Scott Card has hit the nail on the head. He understands that authors re-use each others' ideas all the time, and certainly Ender's Game gets its share of re-use. Did Rowling's success go to her head?" Card lays out (something like tongue-in-cheek) some of the similarities between the story in Ender's Game and in the Potter series: "A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader." (And that's just to get started.)

Comments

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[eldavojohn]

Writers will always sue the pants off each other and sometimes even other sources! Always have, always will. It just depends on how big of an orc ... I mean ass they are. I think that Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" pointed out how, through one way or another, nearly everyone owes at least something to those who came before and the Monomyth. You want to write a good fiction story? Simply take Campbell's book and dump the Monomyth into some environment of today. If I may say so myself, Rowling is a few mousekateers short of a full Mickey Mouse group ... uh, I mean she's a few rhymes short of a full Cat in the Hat ... uh, I mean she's a few Knights Templar short of a full Da Vinci's Code ... that is to say she's a few crystals short of a Jedi Lightsaber ...

Aw, christ, I'll just put my lawyer on speed dial.

Re:The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[MightyMartian]

Actually, there was little or nothing that Shakespeare could have done in his time to prevent someone writing a play called Humlet Duke of Dinmark. And yet Shakespeare did alright financially (well enough to build a theater), and, in fact, has been regarded for much of that time as being not only one of the greatest writers in the English language, but in the entire history of our species. That his plays have been cribbed by later playwrights, writers and into the modern age movie and TV show creators has not diminished his reputation.

The idea that a writer could make fanastical amounts of money (and let's be honest here, there are only a handful of authors that have had the kind of success Rowlings has had) simply by writing is a pretty new one. Do you think Homer got royalties every time a copy of the Illiad was produced? Do you think the Akkadian kings went after people that made copies of the Gilgamesh epic, or added their own bits to it? The story of world literature is one of works being added to, chronicled and sometimes even being outright stolen (the Hebrews did it when they ripped off big chunks of the Sumero-Akkadian creation and cosmographical myths). Do you think world literature over the five or six thousand years that it has existed (many times longer if you count oral transmission of stories) has suffered because for the overwhelming majority of that time authors had little or no protection against plagiarism and unauthorized derivative works?

Making a Quick Buck versus Making Commentary

[ancarett]

As an academic who's written critical works on contemporary media, I'm all for fair use and the freedom for fans or opponents to employ some material in their own work. But that isn't what this proposed Lexicon is, in truth.

This isn't fair use (news reporting, educational or criticism, although the publisher tries to pretend the latter) or transformative in any way: van der Ark's Lexicon is a summary of elements in the work. That means that, as a secondary work about Harry Potter, this is much more akin to the Castle Rock case: copying fragments of the work.

More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications (like some of the other guidebooks she's produced), while this work is taking the unpaid labour of countless fans who contributed to the Lexicon website and turning it to the personal profit of the site's disgruntled owner (who's cranky because his good buddy "Jo" wouldn't give him a paying job in the UK to edit her own encyclopedia).

The whole imbroglio has been amply covered by the helpful souls at Fandom Wank if you want to get a feel for what others besides OSC have said. (Anne Rice has even weighed in!)

Oh, look, it's OSC being a moron again...

[laura20]

...why am I not surprised?

To clarify:

The Lexicon website consisted for the most part of entries where the editors had gone through the books, chopped out the various bits describing the element at hand and plopped them in the entry. The amount of straight quoting was huge, the amount of barely reworded items possibly even larger. Let's go to Dave Langford for a typical wordcount: "When I checked, the on-line Lexicon's 1500 words on Albus Dumbledore had about 300 words of direct quotation from Rowling (which seemed risky) and linked to a page with some 3000 words of quotes (which seemed suicidal)." This is certainly very useful to fanfic authors, and as long as it was noncommercial, Rowlings quite kindly tolerated it.

Then in a perfect storm of stupidity, RDR Books decided that obviously this meant they could publish it at 24.95 a pop. Rowlings and her publishers said "uh, no". I'll note that they spent two months trying to get a manuscript out of RDR or Steve Vander Ark, and were informed that they should "just hit print on the website." Yes, the website that *mostly consisted of quotes and rewordings*. Eventually they realized how suicidal that was, and produced a hacked down manuscript that *still* took large amounts straight from her wording.

And like most bad lawsuits, it'll make bad law. If she wins, other publishers and authors will no doubt push the boundaries to claim that any kind of encyclopedia of their fictional universes is unlawful, even if the writers actually do their own work; and if she loses (highly unlikely, but if) other authors will feel like they need to be a bitch to every online effort of this sort, lest they be seen as authorizing similar publishings -- one of the claims that RDR/SVA made was that by tolerating it, she was authorizing it.