HP Battle to Decide Comment Control
Harry Potter Battle to Decide Comment Control
Mich. pair sued over Lexicon book
BY EMILIA ASKARI • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • APRIL 8, 2008
Not even Professor Trelawney, fictional divination teacher in the popular Harry Potter books, could have predicted that two average Michigan guys would wind up in court this month, locked in a precedent-setting battle for the boy wizard's soul.
But they are.
Since the suit alleging copyright infringement was filed in October, scholars and philanthropists have rallied to support Muskegon publisher Roger Rapoport and Steve Vander Ark, founder of a well-known Potter fansite called The Harry Potter Lexicon.
The two want to publish a book version of the Web site that would have the same name. Rapoport owns RDR Books.
But author J.K. Rowling, who has sold 300 million copies of her wildly popular Harry Potter books, and Warner Bros., producers of the hit Potter films, contend that a Lexicon book would violate Rowling's copyrights on the Potter world. She and Warner Bros. sued RDR to stop the Lexicon book's printing. The suit is scheduled for trial Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Vander Ark is not named as a defendant.
The case has implications for anyone who comments on a book, song or other creative work on Facebook or YouTube, lawyers say. It also will help define how much control authors have over their characters, according to legal experts.
"This is an example of an author trying to control every commentary about her works," said David Hammer, one of Rapoport's attorneys. "If it's successful, scholarship and even playful commentary on literature that's under copyright will be awfully difficult."
Rowling's attorneys could not be reached. Her agent, however, forwarded copies of legal filings stating that the Lexicon is "devoid of analysis, commentary or anything else rising to the level of scholarship" and therefore is not protected by case law allowing scholarly criticism of literary works.
The normally media-shy Rowling is lined up to testify. So are Rapoport and Vander Ark, who is writing a travel guide to places in Europe that resemble settings described in the Potter books.
The book version of the Harry Potter Lexicon is an encyclopedic reference to the Potter canon. It includes things like lists of potion ingredients and the family trees of various characters.
Everything in the Lexicon book has already been published on the Lexicon Web site, which Rowling and Warner Bros. have praised over the years, giving Vander Ark a fan award in 2004 and flying him to the set of the fifth Harry Potter film in 2006.
Since Vander Ark created the Web site in 2000, it has been a volunteer effort that earned little money.
When Vander Ark and Rapoport last year seemed on the verge of making a profit on the book version of the Web site, Rowling and Warner Bros. sued. Rowling has said that she plans to write her own encyclopedic reference to her Potter books and donate the royalties to charity.
"Given my past good relations with the Lexicon Web site, I can only feel sad and disillusioned that this is where we have ended up," Rowling stated on her Web site last fall. She has made no other public statements about the case since.
The case has generated a blizzard of anguished commentary on fan sites and considerable opinion on legal blogs as well.
Fans of free speech and the so-called "fair use" of literary quotes formed a fund called The Right to Write, which aims to protect everyone's right to comment on published literary works. The fund has raised about $15,000 and plans to contribute to Rapoport's expenses.
Rapoport is grateful for the fund's help. His business is not exactly a heavy-hitter in the publishing industry. So far, the largest first printing of any RDR book has been 10,000.
"The message I'm trying to get out is you don't have to fold because you're not big," he said last month.
Contact EMILIA ASKARI at248-351-3298 or easkari@freepress.com.