Harry Potter Lexicon
A interesting court case is coming up at the end of the month to determine whether a website can be published as a book...
JK Rowling is trying to prevent publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon (www.hp-lexicon.org/), an A-Z guide to all things Hogwarts set up by fan of the books, Steve Vander Ark.
It could be a landmark case, because what is at stake is not just an author's right to control the publication of secondary works but also the right to publish in book form information that has been previously available on the web.
Since 2000, the Lexicon website has been an authority on Harry Potter and has been used by everyone from fans to Rowling herself.
In2005, Cheryl Klein, the editor of Harry Potter 6, sent Vander Ark a note that read, "On behalf of the Scholastic Half-Blood Prince editorial staff, I'd like to say thank you for the wonderful resource your site provides for fans, students and indeed editors and copy editors of the Harry Potter series. We referred to the Lexicon countless times during the editing of HP6, whether to verify a fact, check a timeline or get a chapter and book reference for a particular event."
Apparently everyone seemed very happy with the Lexicon so long as it remained on the internet and didn't make any real money - it has only earned $6,000 in advertising revenue over seven and a half years. Now that a book is planned JK is trying to stop it.
Anthony Falzone, a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School who advises on intellectual property will be representing RDR for free "This is a hugely important case about a third party's right to create a new reference book that is designed to help others better understand the original work," he says. "No one is going to buy, or indeed make sense of, the Lexicon unless they have read the Harry Potter books.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2264180,00.html
JK Rowling is trying to prevent publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon (www.hp-lexicon.org/), an A-Z guide to all things Hogwarts set up by fan of the books, Steve Vander Ark.
It could be a landmark case, because what is at stake is not just an author's right to control the publication of secondary works but also the right to publish in book form information that has been previously available on the web.
Since 2000, the Lexicon website has been an authority on Harry Potter and has been used by everyone from fans to Rowling herself.
In2005, Cheryl Klein, the editor of Harry Potter 6, sent Vander Ark a note that read, "On behalf of the Scholastic Half-Blood Prince editorial staff, I'd like to say thank you for the wonderful resource your site provides for fans, students and indeed editors and copy editors of the Harry Potter series. We referred to the Lexicon countless times during the editing of HP6, whether to verify a fact, check a timeline or get a chapter and book reference for a particular event."
Apparently everyone seemed very happy with the Lexicon so long as it remained on the internet and didn't make any real money - it has only earned $6,000 in advertising revenue over seven and a half years. Now that a book is planned JK is trying to stop it.
Anthony Falzone, a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School who advises on intellectual property will be representing RDR for free "This is a hugely important case about a third party's right to create a new reference book that is designed to help others better understand the original work," he says. "No one is going to buy, or indeed make sense of, the Lexicon unless they have read the Harry Potter books.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,,2264180,00.html
