J.K. Rowling is suing the publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon, which began life as a popular Potter blog, and wants a court to rule that she has the sole right to profit from the "descriptions, character details, and plot points" of the Potter tales. Now, a federal judge has issued an injunction against RDR Books to prevent them from completing the typesetting, selling the books, or even marketing it on Amazon.com.

The case has been percolating for a few weeks now, but the injunction last week makes this a good time to take a look at what's going on here. Steve Vander Ark, the lead author of the online Lexicon, wants to publish his material in book form. Warner Bros. and Rowling, who are jointly suing Vander Ark's publisher, call this a "willful and blatant violation of Plaintiffs' respective intellectual property rights," this despite the fact that Rowling has publicly praised the site in the past. The plaintiffs are under the apparent conviction that the material on the web site is fine, but that when put into a book, it becomes a copyright violation. Much of this has to do with money.

"There is a big difference between the innumerable Harry Potter fan sites' latitude to discuss the Harry Potter Works in the context of free, ephemeral web sites and unilaterally repackaging those sites for sale in an effort to cash and monetarily on Ms. Rowling's creative works in contravention of her wishes and rights," says the federal complaint, filed late last month in New York. Rowling, it turns out, has long wanted to produce her own companion book to the popular children's series and donate the money to charity. She believes that the Lexicon would eliminate much of the demand for her product (because past titles with "J.K. Rowling" on the cover have sold so poorly).

The complaint repeatedly stresses that Rowling has not "authorized" such a work, though whether such authorization is even necessary will certainly be one of the key points in the case. The Lexicon is stuffed with plot summaries, maps, and the sort of minutely detailed timelines you'd expect from such an endeavor. It's a huge treasure trove of information of Harry Potter characters and the world they inhabit.

This sort of thing is par for the course when it comes to popular series; both Narnia and Middle-Earth have a number of such guides, and the more-common CliffsNotes include exactly this sort of material for even recent books like Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Why it's a major copyright violation in this case isn't clear; the complaint sometimes suggests that it contains large passages lifted verbatim from the books, but at other times seems to be saying that simple plot summaries and collections of fictional facts are out of bounds (and it quotes a federal decision finding that detailed plot summaries of Twin Peaks episodes were copyright infringement).

Playground sparring



The complaint itself is a bit juvenile. There are repeated nonfactual statements sprinkled liberally throughout, such as the fact that RDR Books once "replied cursorily" and that the plaintiffs were "patiently waiting." This sort of thing grows quickly tiresome, but can also prove hilarious. Case in point: upon learning that the book would be essentially a "print version" of the online Lexicon, Warner Bros. asked for a copy of the web site... on paper. RDR Books replied "rudely," saying, "If you do not know how to print that material please ask one of your people to show you how." It's a valid point.

There's plenty of this playground sparring to go around. RDR Books at one point responded to Warner Bros. lawyers by claiming that the Harry Potter filmmakers had used a copyrighted Lexicon-produced timeline. Warner calls this "a complete fabrication."

Despite all the unpleasantness, Vander Ark still signs recent news posts, "still Jo's man, through and through." "There is a crazy part of me that believes that if she and I could just sit down and chat about this, we could get it all sorted out and put this miserable incident behind us," he wrote on November 10.

Unlikely. In a recent entry on her own site, Rowling complained, "It is not reasonable, or legal, for anybody, fan or otherwise, to take an author's hard work, re-organize their characters and plots, and sell them for their own commercial gain. However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell." That in itself is a highly suspect claim. The weirdest thing of all is that similar items to the Lexicon have already been on the market for years.

Actually, I take it back; that's not the weirdest thing of all. That honor is reserved for the Lexicon itself, which certainly takes liberal advantage of fair use to print hundreds of little snippets from the Harry Potter books. But try to copy one line from the site for purposes of commentary and criticism, and you're met with the dialog box, "copyright 2001-2006 The Harry Potter Lexicon." Nice. (Note to the Lexicon's designers: disabling the right mouse click does not actually disable the ability to copy.)

William Patry, Google's senior copyright counsel, has looked into the case a bit. His conclusion? "I haven't spent a lot of time on the site and so don't know if there is other material that might be infringing, but I don't see how a list of spells with this type of commentary is anything other than fair use." Patry also notes that one of the cases cited by the plaintiffs in support of their position actually was "of a very different sort" from the current conflict.

So now a judge gets to work it out, possibly most Muggle-ish solution to this magical dispute that anyone could have imagined.