Harry Potter and the battle of the lexicon

The little guy should have freedom!

The Lexicon is a free internet site, a Lexicon book however is profit making.
This book is mostly just JKR's work put
into alphabetical order, a person can use another persons work but most of it has to be original.

He should just rewrite the book because I hear 91percent of it has been plagiarized. RDR should have know what they were doing an realized it. I don't feel for SVA at all he's a grown man.

I also read some of the transcripts from the trial and RDR Books seem to changew the purpose of the Lexicon book. First it's for the long time reader and then they make it to be for the first time reader. The problem that I can see is for the first time reader they will find out what happens to characters, and for the people who have read the book they will already know about most things already in the book or they can look it up for free online.

I would like Steve Vander Ark to know that I'm a Harry Potter fan, or, well, I was. But I support him. Not all potter fans (or former potter fans) are in support of JKR. A lot of them are just keeping mum right now but they are all turned off with how JKR has changed into an ugly all-grasping corporate monster. She's my hero no more.

Nerd fight!

What is more interesting is the entire phenomenon of publishers and authors vying for total control of their material, and trying to prevent spoofs and critiques. How is this much different from the medieval Catholic Church's attempts at preventing heresy? Yes, there is this added monetary issue, but wasn't that also at play in heresy disputes? If one went against the church, it might impact the church's take. Do not read this as a critique of the church, however, as I am merely suggesting that debates about heresy and by extension authoritarian control over written materials is not entirely different from issues of heresy, and it may very well be a derivative historical phenomenon.
If scholarship worked like that, the use of citation or summarization (in overviews, etc.) of other scholars' work, or the materials of other cultures (say, if one couldn't write about Chinese religion without Chinese governmental approval) would be utterly impossible. Could the religious groups put a stop to discussion of or summaries of their religion or religious texts if they didn't want to lose out on possible monetary gain? Similarly, ought governments silence publication of material that is possibly detrimental to their total control over a populace and their financial obligations? In short, is a free press only free when it is free (i.e. not being sold at a price)?

I should think that the author and publisher should be happy to be out of the "Harry Potter Community." I am personally disgusted at Rowling's greedy disregard for the limits of U.S. copyright law and am appalled that she would bring this shamefully ill-considered lawsuit.

I hope to hear no more of her.

Oh yeah... She's greedy all right....Didn't anyone tell you that all she makes from her encyclopedia is going to charity??? I think that before you guys can be this mean to her is if you have read the full court transcript. Which I have.

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 [ansible.co.uk] 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 **** 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.

The fact that she's suing a website whose words have been in full view for years, have publicized and promoted her work, and she herself utilized, acknowledged and praised the site, is appalling to me. A bigger person would find a resolution outside of the courtroom, but she's clearly not taking the moral high road here.
The Potter websites still pander to her and fawn over her every breath, ready and waiting to pounce on the keyboard in reply to any different opinion of her. But I think the average fan has enjoyed the books and moved on, recognizing that Harry Potter is now a mass marketed business, and a little less magical because of that.

i 4 one would love it if Vander Ark could publish and think rowling is wrong your still good and important in my books

I guess the $1B Rowling has isn't enough for her?

Carol - Rowling is not suing the website. She's suing the publisher of the book for copyright infringement. Try learning the facts of the case before condemning her.

If you're a college student and you want to use the logic of RPR, you'll find yourself reprimanded and/or expelled very quickly.

Bring it into the real world w/ the rules of fair use (which RPR has clearly and substantially broken), copyright protection, and the market, you're going to get sued.

You want to write a book? Write your own book. You want to write about someone else's work? Do the scholarship; don't plagiarize and expect to profit from it. Even writers with barely a fraction of Rowling's net worth would sue a shoddy and filching operation like RPR.

**** at the stooges above who claim to understand copyright law and yet have obviously no comprehension of libel law.

Rowling is asking for an expansion of copyright law, one that not even *Disney* has requested. That should tell you all you need to know.

Power corrupts. You folks need to learn to separate the artist from the art.

@Idiots ****

Considering that RDR could not produce one single example of a book that took as much copyrighted material as the Lexicon and added less commentary, it is RDR who is asking for an expansion of fair use laws, not the other way around. Idiot **** is just re-stating the RDR line, not addressing what was proven in court.

I think one reason Steve Vander Ark's reputation has suffered with the fans is because he appears to have been two-faced about the whole thing.

When he is talking to fans, he plays an innocent victim who was tricked by RDR books, but then at the same time he makes public statements claiming that he is defending creativity and that JKR wants to shut down the fans.

The perfect example of this came out in court when he testified that he never felt RDR misled him only to have an e-mail produced in which he said he would back out of the book deal if he could and RDR had misled and lied to him.(This was an e-mail sent to an HP fan.)

Which one is it? Innocent victim or defender of the common man? Make up your mind, dude. It appears that he is trying to have it both ways, to play both sides, and thinks the fans are too stupid to see what he is doing. So yeah, that has hurt his reputation.

I love who Roger Rappaport still is spinning webs of lies to get attention.

Warner Brother and JK Rowling spend months trying to get a copy of the manuscript so they can Firstly, check if it is legally allowable under the law, and Secoundly, if it isent fair use, as industry standerd goes and as jk rowling has done many times other companion book writers, suggest changes to make it fair use.

JK Rowling isent against companion books, but she draws the line when a writer copies so much from her copyrighted works, but those not provide new insights. the court documents show that 91% of the book was simply copied word for word, or near word for word from her books, with other percents copyied in the same manner from other copyrighted works, and the small ammount of original work from the vander ark is filled with glaring inaccuracys presented as solid fact.

Roger Rappaport brought the lawsuit on himself becuase he refused to work with or acknowledge jk rowling's copyrights. he even in court stated he knows his book infringes her rights. for him to continue to claim it is unreasonable for her to be angry over a companion book simply being +90% material copyrighted to her and other sources is a affront to authors everywhere who have every right to protect their works.

Exactly, Tired(#1&) From what I've read this Vander Ark is either two-faced or completely nuts.

Sounds like they ain't in settlement talks.

Also sounds like Roger the Dodger doesn't think he's gonna win. It's all hot air.