The Harry Potter Trial
I just HAD to wade in on this one finally. I've been following this case with some interest for a while, and as of yesterday, it moved into a realm even I didn't see coming.

Background: JK Rowling -- the queen of all things Potter, and an amazing writer as far as I'm concerned -- wrote the Potter books. And they were huge. That part y'all know.

Steven Vander Ark is the guy who runs the Harry Potter Lexicon. He's the uncrowned king of all things Harry, and has carefully documented everything for years. Rowling, in a statement now made super-famous by Vander Ark's lawyers, posted on her Web site that she thinks the Lexicon is THE place online for all things Harry, and she's been known to slip out of the cafe where she's working on her book and pop online to check out facts against what he's written.

Vander Ark was given opportunities to publish the Lexicon in book format, and declined, until the final Harry book was out there. And then RDR books, a publisher in the US, asked him to do so. He gathered up his materials, and turned it into a book.

The book has yet to see the light of day because of what happened next, but I would assume it's similar to another excellent companion guide that came out about 3 years ago that I used as a bible while reading the Harry books. Encyclopedic, with entries on the characters, places, terms (how many times I opened that book to look up what a "squib" was I have no idea), etc., to help readers who may no be reading the books one after the other. What was amazing about the other companion was that it came out while the books were still being written, so while we're forced to wait 2 years between books, and then hit the term "squib" and she, of course, will not define it for us again, it was a serious help. That earlier companion book disappeared after its initial print run, because Rowling's lawyers wanted it to.

So now Vander Ark is finding himself in the same predicament. Despite professing a love of his Web site, Rowling has declared war on his book. It stands to reason that what is good for the Web is not good for the printed page -- my Lost books (here and here) contain very little plot summary and more analysis, while my blog posts a lot more plot. I don't make money off the blog, where I make a pittance off the book. (And trust me, writing these things brings in very little cashola; if you don't love it, DON'T DO IT.)

But Rowling's lawyers have gone beyond protecting her copyright and trademark in this. They've basically cast a net over the English language canon and said Rowling owns the rights to it. In an ironic twist, "Harry Potter" has become He Who Must Not Be Named, for if you do, you will incur the wrath of Rowling.

I say Rowling here, because where up until now all of the other Harry companions that have been squashed were savaged by her lawyers, and not her (it's what she pays them for), Rowling herself has come out and said nasty things about Vander Ark and his book. So if she wants to wade in first person, she becomes the one to disagree with when taking his side.

Rowling's lawyers have made the same charges against Vander Ark that they've made against all the other companions: By its very presence, it hurts her sales, and hurts the sales of any future books. By referring to elements of her book, it violates her copyright of the materials therein, and makes it so you don't have to read her books.

Which is utter crap. These companion guides don't say, "OK, so the first book opens with it being nighttime and we move in on this little house on a street. A bunch of wizards are flying through the air and they have this baby..." No. It gives us names and places to look up while we are reading, but it's in no way a substitute for the actual book. It's like saying the dictionary is in violation of her copyright because it contains most of the words used in her books.

Secondly, how could it POSSIBLY hurt her sales? Who in their right mind is buying Vander Ark's book (or ANY of the companions) and not actually reading her books?? I wouldn't dream of a non-Lost fan buying and reading my book, unless it's my uncle wanting to support his niece. These companion guides are not meant for the casual reader who's looking for a good book to curl up with; these are meant to be companions to something else... hence the name companion guides.

Rowling has made it very clear (and so have her lawyers, in all their letters to publishers) that she herself plans to write an encyclopedia of Potter, and if it's already done, there's no room for her to do so. But here's where that argument falls apart: Only in these lawyer's letters does she actually say these companions could hurt that. But look up any number of interviews done with her in the recent past, and she's going on and on about an encyclopedia she's going to write that A) she plans to publish 10 years from now, when these companions will be long of out print anyway, and B) will give readers all the background of the books and characters that is not in the actual books. In other words, her encyclopedia is the one that ONLY JKR could write, no one else, and I could own every single companion guide out there -- I would still buy hers. Who doesn't want to know what her original intentions were for each character? Or what the possible alternate endings were? Or what storylines she scrapped? Could these other encyclopedic companions possibly give us that information? No. But in the meantime, they can help other people come to Harry Potter by offering an easy look-up device that makes reading these books less frustrating.

Not to mention, I could be wrong here, but I don't think she has much of a strong case saying that he is hurting the sales of a book she hasn't even begun to write yet, and might not write. It's like saying, "Well, I was TOTALLY going to do up a Harry Potter Web site with all of the terms in my books and call it a Lexicon, and it was going to have the EXACT same design as yours, and you took it first." That's the sort of reasoning my 3-year-old uses.

JK Rowling is a gabillionaire. (That's a billion multiplied by ga. I know. HUGE.) Somewhere along the line, she's realized, "Oh... all this negative publicity" [because yes, most of the media and bloggers I've read on the subject are actually looking at her like the nasty Goliath in this case] "is making me look bad. I mean, I already have so much money the queen is asking me for loans, so how do I help my case now??" And yesterday, she figured out how.

On the stand for the first time in this case, she's now saying that she's feeling so drained and betrayed and awful about all of this that she no longer has the heart to write that encyclopedia, and she was going to give all that money the encyclopedia would garner to charity. "So I guess it's too bad those orphans are all going to starve to death, thanks to Steven Vander Ark," one could imagine her saying.

Seriously, that's just going too far. The woman took the word "Muggles" from another book, but because Rowling had more money than that author, she won, and the other author looked like a whiner. She's taken the quest narrative from any number of books; hell, Tolkien would be turning in his grave if he knew how much she had "borrowed" from him. And speaking of Tolkien, check out how many companion guides and encyclopedias are available of HIS books, and his estate has the good graces to leave them alone. They see them as nothing more than guides to his books, and not infringing anything. And I think we can all agree that Tolkien's sales haven't even incurred the tiniest scratch due to the presence of those other books.

If Rowling wins, this could see the death of all books like Vander Ark's, and I'm not just talking about the sort of books that I write. All academic treatises will be under attack; Cliff's Notes will disappear; SparkNotes.com will shut down; hell, any student trying to write a PhD and using any line from any book will come under suspicion. Then it will extend further: TV show websites will be gone because they're talking about plot of a show. Television Without Pity will end (they make it so you really DON'T have to watch the episodes if you don't want to) and all forums will be policed so no one infringes copyright.

Which shows you how ridiculous this claim is. You can see the first defense filed against Rowling here, and yesterday's NY Times article on Rowling's testimony here.

Now, like I said, the general public hasn't seen the book. It COULD be sloppy, there COULD be very little research, as Rowling suggests. And if that's the case, one could say in her defense that she doesn't want something that sloppy to be standing in as a temporary encyclopedia until hers comes along. But the companion guide that I was referring to earlier was excellent, accurate, researched down to the tiniest detail, and contained a lot of outside information that enriched the process of reading her books. And she quashed that one, too. So her argument is suspect to me.

Let's just let Vander Ark put out his book. I'm not being totally biased in my support for this guy -- he was nasty to a friend of mine a few years back and I've not been a fan of his ever since -- but I am on his side in this battle, and I have a ton of respect for anyone with the guts to fight Goliath in this one.

May David reign.