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Hermione probably wouldn’t be happy. After all, it seems like a Slytherin kind of thing to do. Yes, it’s Harry Potter legal news.

 

J.K. Rowling, the author of the wildly popular Harry Potter series, has just won a victory against one of her fans in a copyright case. The case included Rowling tearing up on the stand and other dramatics.

 

The furor was over a “lexicon,” a kind of encyclopedia, based on the series. In fact, the lexicon was something that Rowling herself had once praised…until it became a threat to her making another few million dollars to add to her already bulging vaults.

 

The Harry Potter Lexicon is a book that was set to be published by an independent publisher, RDR Books. It’s basically an encyclopedia of the Harry Potter series, arranged alphabetically. It covers various persons, places, things, and so forth in the series, usually just putting down descriptive excerpts from the books. There was some limited commentary that was the work of Steve Vander Ark, the creator of the lexicon, but not much.

 

Vander Ark had spiffed up the online version of the lexicon and gotten it into print form. Rowling then sued, claiming that she was planning a lexicon-style book of her own, and that Vander Ark’s book would cause her “irreparable damage.”

 

On Monday, the judge in the case agreed with Rowling.

 

This is one of the bigger cases on fair use to come down in a while. Judge Patterson basically decided that the lexicon took too much of Rowling’s books and didn’t add enough of Vander Ark’s own words. The judge did make a likely-doomed-to-failure plea to keep the spirit of reference works alive in spite of the ruling.

 

The irony is that the decision apparently rests on the grounds that Vander Ark didn’t provide enough material of his own to make the book useful; however, Rowling herself has gone on record that she would use the online version of the lexicon as a reference guide, so she clearly saw some value in it. At least, she did until she decided she could make a few more bucks off of the Harry Potter phenomenon, while destroying the name of one of her biggest fans in the process.

 

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