Oi!

[ivyblossom]

Well, this just makes me sad:

Rowling acknowledged she once bestowed an award on Vander Ark's Web site because, she said, she wanted to encourage a very enthusiastic fan.

But she said she "almost choked on my coffee" one morning when she realized Vander Ark had warned others not to copy portions of his Web site. She said she now has second thoughts about all the encouragement she has given to online discussions and Web sites devoted to her books.

"I never censored it or wanted to censor it," she said, adding that if she loses the lawsuit, she will conclude she essentially gave away her copyrights by encouraging the Web sites.

"Other authors will say, `I need to exercise more control. She was an idiot. She let it all go,'" Rowling said.

Comments

[twilightbyproxy.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad too. I also hope that the judge will rule in her favor.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I don't. I hope he rules in Steve's. I don't want to see her turn into Anne Rice.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm annoyed with her for threatening fandom. "If I lose, all fandoms will suffer!" WTF. He's not hurting her in any way. This is ridiculous.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Me too.

[airemay.livejournal.com]

I cannot believe she choked on her coffee.

Does she not realize the amount of work that Steve and his team put into the website?? To just copy portions of it... without asking especially?? That is rude! Steve has every right to warn people not to copy things from his site.

I'm not sure which way I want it to go. However, I think that some of JKR's comments are ridiculous.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I'd love to find out why she's actually doing this. The given excuse just doesn't make any sense. Did she think she owns Steve's work?

[zing_och.livejournal.com]

This whole thing is such a huge mess by now, I don't know who I want to win. From what I've read, most of the stuff he's trying to publish is really pretty much c&p from the books. At this point I'm not sure if the essays are even in there - there was some brouhaha about authors who had essays up on the Lexicon site not being asked if it was okay to publish their work. The publisher and their legal counsel behaved pretty stupid, and assholish, too.

On the other hand all this nearly-crying and threatening to take her toys and go home... not really something that makes me sympathetic to Rowling.

As someone said, this has been going on for months (its tag on fandom_wank is "this is the wank that never ends"). It'll be interesting to see what the mainstream media say. Reactions in fandom have been all over the board...

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

The Observer Review (Sunday broadsheet in the UK) have already noted it, and were pro SVA.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

That's where I came in, the nearly-crying poor me business. Again, I haven't seen any c/p in the lexicon. Only paraphrases with quotes. If she had a problem with it, I wish she's said so back in 1999 or 2000, or even 2004, instead of now. I doubt I would have waded into this fandom if I knew she was going to behave like this.

[kerri]

There are some graphics and stuff out there, that show just how much of the Lexicon book is going to be just regurgitated facts from the books. And you know, I can understand the objection that she has. She's planning on writing an encyclopedia herself, and as much as I love the Lexicon, most of it -is- just facts from the books written down.

But really, I have to say she sort of said it well herself - it's a good resource, but why should he profit from it when from what it looks like, it doesn't contain any original material?? That's what's crossing the line, for me. He wants to profit from it. She probably wouldn't have had a problem if he was publishing a book of essays, or something along those lines. A reader's guide usually contains opinions, as well - I've read them myself, and they usually have SOME original work, or contribution But all he's doing is writing a summary of what she herself created, and I don't think he should profit from that.

Most of all, my inner fan just thinks that what really stinks the most is the fact that he's had ample time to back away from this, and hasn't.

[twilightbyproxy.livejournal.com]

Most of all, my inner fan just thinks that what really stinks the most is the fact that he's had ample time to back away from this, and hasn't.

I realized tonight just thinking about it that Steve actually had ample time and opportunity to rewrite and make the work his own and properly so. But he hasn't, and RDR is irresponsible for not encouraging him to do so. I have a feeling that if he followed through on the idea a lot better with his own content, that things would be different overall.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, fandom isn't into profit, so this is distasteful from that side of things, but that's fandom morality, nothing to do with legal stuff. If he'd tried to publish an HP fanfiction novel, which would at least, by fandom standards, have "original content", he'd be in serious hot water I'd presume, so it's hard to really transfer fandom morality into the real world. I agree with you, I wouldn't have tried to publish it personally, but now that it's in action...well I'm coming at this from the mock crying on the stand perspective, that might be colouring my view. :/

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad how she seems incapable of speaking publically without embarrassing herself in some way. I always thought her interviews and website comments were bad, but honestly - It's making me cry? It's like choosing a favourite child? It's his fault progress on my next book has stopped and my creativity is stifled (what's her excuse for the last three?) STFU, JKR.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh hardcore. I so agree. I thought she was a bit more savvy about her fans than this, but I see now...not so much.

[ciceronianus.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I don't think there's anything more to JKR's words and actions than a sincere belief they are hers and not Steve's - she's essentially trying to keep RDR from publishing her words again and putting someone else's name on it. I was surprised to read that she was close to tears, but I suppose it's not really a stretch - maybe when the question was asked she genuinely looked at the hardest times of her life (before her books were published) and it hit her at once what Harry and her work and everything that led to her success meant?

Who knows, though? Maybe everything will come out after the trial - or, more likely, nothing will.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't realize RDR was republishing the books themselves and claiming that Steve wrote them!

[ninja-tech.livejournal.com]

Wow. Well, it's all been said above this little comment. It does seem sometimes that now that JKR has finished the HP series, she keeps finding reasons to be in the spotlight. Maybe she has been in the spotlight so long she can't handle not being in it in some way. I used to really like her, but I'm starting to go a little sour now...

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh, how astute! Perhaps that's what it is! It's clearly SOMETHING other than what they're saying it is, something just doesn't fit here. I'm going seriously sour too!

[oconel]

According to this (scroll down to the graphics) the book more of JKR's work than just some quotes, but since I don't get all the legal stuff I won't really go there.

What I don't like of the whole issue is that the only author acknowledged seems to be Steve, even though other people have worked on the Lexicon.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a good point! I don't know much about how the lexicon was produced...I've only ever seen Steve's named linked to it. Interesting indeed!

[max-ambiguity.livejournal.com]

That document was written by the plaintiffs, so of course it presents the work as more than just a few quotes. That's the basis of their claim. But it doesn't mean they're right or that they aren't spinning the facts to their own benefit. They are - that's their job.

[kerri]

That's because none of the other material is being included, or if it is, it's being included without their permission.

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I've been following this for a while and this is the first I've heard of tears. Before this it really looked like it was just a simple, "Please don't do this, I was happy when you were doing it as a fan, but you can't use somebody else's work and profit from it. Please stop." "No, really, please stop. I don't want to sue you." "No, really, stop now." "I said STOP."

This has been going on for a long time. SVA had plenty of time to get out of it, or change his work so that it wasn't violating copyright precedent. There's plenty of books out there that are based on/around/discuss Rowling's work, and she has no problem with any of them, because she's not planning on putting out anything similar to them. She's been talking about putting together an encyclopedia for a long, long time, she indicated that she felt SVA shouldn't try to publish one of his own a long, long time ago, and I really think SVA should've listened to the many lawyers who told him he wouldn't be able to do this legally. As a law student (not a lawyer yet, so I may be talking out of my hat here!) I was really, really bewildered to hear that any lawyer could've told him he had a right to do what he was doing. It flew in the face of everything I'd ever learned about copyright law in Introduction to Property. Mind you, again, I'm not even a lawyer yet, let alone a copyright lawyer, so i may be missing something.

And I agree, I don't much like how Rowling sounds like she's threatening to stop encouraging websites either. Unfortunately I don't think she's just blowing hot air on this one; other authors are saying that if this lawsuit decides that Rowling gave away her copyrights by encouraging websites, they will go the way of Anne Rice and Anne McCaffrey (I think) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (& her estate), to name just three biggies, and state up-front that they do not approve of fanfiction and will go after people who write it.

Sorry. Just my two bits on this.

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

I was really, really bewildered to hear that any lawyer could've told him he had a right to do what he was doing. It flew in the face of everything I'd ever learned about copyright law in Introduction to Property. Mind you, again, I'm not even a lawyer yet, let alone a copyright lawyer, so i may be missing something.
I should probably point out that what I learned was pretty basic, and boiled down to this:

Copyright = is the right to own noncorporeal things pertaining to intellectual property: names, distinctive marks, words, etc. It is the method by which people earn money for intellectual stuff. Rowling does not own the book you bought from Coles; you do. But she owns the words in that book. You can sell your physical book; you cannot sell the words to somebody else (ie, somebody writing a screenplay for a movie).

The reason for copyright is that it is the only way for somebody who works creatively to gain money from their work. If it didn't exist, JK would be penniless and Scholastic would be filthy rich.

Copyright is supposed to protect the integrity of the work (so nobody can "damage" it by selling it in a changed fashion, eg sell a book to a publishing company that has the exact same plots but names the characters Harry Potsmoker, Ron Welfarecase, and Hermione Grrrl, thereby making it sound stupid and making people have less respect for it) and to protect the creator's ability to make a profit from their work.

If you do either of the above ("damage" the work, or cut into the creator's profits), you are in trouble. You have violated copyright.

To get out of trouble, you can say that you didn't damage the original work (which, I don't care what Rowling says right now, I don't think SVA did - I've always thought the Lexicon was brilliant) and/or that your work won't cut into the profit-making ability of the creator.

So if you publish a book of essays re. Harry Potter, you can honestly say that you weren't competing with Rowling because she's never said she had plans to publish a book of essays. Or, in a real case I read for this class, a beauty company that wanted to trademark the name "Pink Panther Beauty Products" was sued by United Artists because they felt the beauty company would infringe on their copyright of the words "Pink Panther" but they lost because beauty products weren't something United Artists was going to put out there anyway, so the beauty company wasn't treading on their toes. And even in that case, the case didn't go completely in the beauty company's favour - they were warned against making any link to the movie Pink Panther, because that would infringe upon United Artists' rights.

http://library.findlaw.com/1998/Nov/1/129008.html

So yeah. With that info, I'm really at a loss to see how any ethical lawyer could've told SVA he was OK to do this. Again, maybe if I was a copyright lawyer I'd see it differently, but from what I understand, most of them agree with Rowling.

Now, whether the law is right or not is a totally different topic ;)

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Of course, if she wins, they won't have much to go on in order to "go after" people who write fanfiction, will there? If what you say is true, how do cliff's notes manage to avoid prosecution, do you think?