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J. K. Rowling Wins $6,750 In Infringement Case
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "J. K. Rowling didn't make enough money on Harry Potter, so she had to make sure that the 'Harry Potter Lexicon' was shut down. After a trial in Manhattan in Warner Bros. v. RDR Books, she won, getting the judge to agree with her (and her friends at Warner Bros. Entertainment) that the 'Lexicon' did not qualify for fair use protection. In a 68-page decision (PDF) the judge concluded that the Lexicon did a little too much 'verbatim copying,' competed with Ms. Rowling's planned encyclopedia, and might compete with her exploitation of songs and poems from the Harry Potter books, although she never made any such claim in presenting her evidence. The judge awarded her $6,750 and granted her an injunction that would prevent the 'Lexicon' from seeing the light of day." Groklaw has an exhaustive discussion of the judgement.
Gee J.K., aren't you rich enough already? The only thing you personally can't buy in England these days is Royalty, and that's somewhat overrated anyway.
And Warner Brothers, why is it your name on the suit? Oh right, you really Really REALLY hate fair use and derivative works now, don't you?
And back to you J.K., why is it that you never even hinted about your own encyclopedia until publication of this lexicon was announced? And why was it never a problem when it was available for the low low price of FREE on the web, which is even more compelling competition than a published version?
But most of all J.K. do you believe even for a moment that anyone is going to choose someone else's version over the version with Your Name On It? Get fsking real here! When yours comes out all your little fans will buy it even if they have everyone else's version already on their bookshelf. YOU AREN'T, AND NEVER WERE, DAMAGED BY THIS BOOK COMPETING AGAINST A BOOK YOU'VE NEVER EVEN WRITTEN, AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL. IF ANYTHING, A GOOD LEXICON *HELPS* YOUR SALES!
J.K. Rowling, you suck! (And I don't mean it in the British sense.)
Mr. Judge, you suck too! Go back to law school and actually learn something about fair use, derivative works, and copyright law!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"I was not aware that society's subjective judgment of whether someone has made "enough" money from one's intellectual property was a factor in copyright law. Either there's a copyright infringement or there isn't. Rowling's wealth and success are irrelevant."
That's because rich people are inherently evil, and have no rights under any civilized system of law.
Sorry, NYCL - you blew this call.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Celebra cadabra?
I have a better idea for you.
Read my response to your bullshit below, and stop flaming people (especially Mr. Beckerman), you disgusting little troll.
The law is clear. The fact that the judge was an idiot who didn't pay attention to the points of law is also clear.
You both sound as if the highlights of literature to you are the letters in the front of a Penthouse magazine. Anything else is just drivel.
It's too bad that the law doesn't care if she was "being a bitch about it." Rapists, I'm sure, would love a clause to that effect. As to whether or not what you have to say actually fucking matters, the beginning of your second paragraph says it all: "I haven't read the lexicon so I don't know how much of it really is copying."
I've never understood these claims about Narnia being religious. I guess the last book in the series is a bit, but most of it is just a story.
Now, if you happen to know a lot about the author's religion you can read that into the books, but I don't think reading the books would tell you much about the author's religion if you lacked any prior knowledge of it.
From what I've heard, Rowling has developed a large amount of background material for her own works, not unlike Tolkien. I have the Silmarillion on CD and used to listen to it on cross country flights. It was very effective in helping me sleep my way across the fly-over states. I can't comment on whether the quality of Tolkien's background material is better than Rowling's, but LotR is just a travelogue. There's nowhere near as much STORY in LotR as there is in the Harry Potter series.
LotR is a very elaborate and detailed description of a fairly short and simple story.
Incidentally and slightly off topic, the really most popular British children's author, Jacqueline Wilson - who writes the books they actually borrow from libraries as well as have adults buy for them - has not made nearly as much money as Rowling, because between hype and solid virtue hype wins every time. Wilson has been involved in an issue thatmay amuse you. In one of her recent books one child calls another a "twat" -I am afraid that in our backward British society some children do occasionally use naughty words. Anyway, the Walmart subsidiary Asda didn't like it, and they had to produce an Asda edition with the word "twit" substituted. A linguistic historian obligingly commented that the word "twat" is itself a euphemism - it means a small cultivated area and occurs in some English town names as "thwaite". But what Asda wants, it gets.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
She's becoming increasingly twatty as she gets richer. Between this and the whole Dumbledore thing which either proves she doesn't care about gay rights and will exclude something like that just for the money or she'll make up things after the fact just to draw more attention to her boring characters.
I hope she chokes on a gay Dumbledore figurine....preferably one that depicts him with as a someone with a clown fetish.
Seriously, I get that there are a lot of fringe copyright zealots here on old \., but an author protecting her solely-created IP from some little fanboy trying to profit off her work and his "doesn't get out much" Potter addiction hardly warrants this kind of posting.
If this item had been posted as a response to an unbiased (yea, I know where I am) news item on the subject, it would have been modded Troll within minutes.