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Right to Write is an organization which helped to defend Roger Rapoport, one of the Defendants in the suit brought by JK Rowling to prevent the publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon

The Right to Write Fund will also establish an educational repository and serve as a clearinghouse focused on fair use and other First Amendment issues confronting authors, especially when works move between print, the Internet, film, the fine arts and new media.

Via Publishers Weekly.

JK Rowling won a copyright suit against Steven Vander Ark and RDR Books with the district court enjoining the publication of the competitor's encyclopedia and reference guide along with $6,750 in damages.  The court found that the Lexicon used too much of the original creator's work to be considered fair use although reference works in general should be "encouraged rather than stifled."  No word yet whether the ruling will be appealed. Thanks Emmy, for the link.

According to Publishers’ Marketplace, Judge Robert Patterson, Jr., is urging RDR and Rowling to settle.

Patterson said, “The fair-use people are on one side, and a large company is on the other side…The parties ought to see if there’s not a way to work this out, because there are strong issues in this case and it could come out one way or the other. The fair-use doctrine is not clear.” He added, “Maybe it’s too late. Maybe we’ve gone too far down the road. But a settlement is better than a lawsuit.”

In other words, Patterson isn’t looking forward to writing an opinion on this topic.

I don’t know that I’ve seen criminal cases moved through the court system as fast as the JK Rowling case. The petition was filed in October and is set for trial at the end of March. Initially oral argument1 was to be held on the preliminary injunction motion on March 13 but now the Court wants to hold a full trial on the same date.

Rowling’s attorneys filed a letter arguing that they weren’t ready to present live testimony and hold a trial. The Court denied the application for more time saying “When the essential facts are not in dispute, the parties should be able to agree to rely on the affidavits and exhibits to be received in evidence and that only certain witnesses need to be examined by the parties.” (same link). The Court is willing to hear oral argument on why this isn’t the case.

It sounds like Judge Patterson doesn’t believe that there should be alot of extraneous live witnesses that some parties want to put forth that have no relevance to the case.

1. Oral argument is where the attorneys for the respective parties argue their positions …

On the SBTB site, Laura Kinsale asked the question “I’m curious. What’s the difference between Cassie Edwards writing about ferrets and fan fiction published for profit?”

Robin’s response was “the fact that fan fiction, by its very nature, has overt attribution.”

My response was

The difference, ethically (and in general), between fan fiction and plagiarism, i.e., the Cassie Edwards repeated use of other people’s words, is the attribution or lack thereof. Fan fiction gives attribution to the original authors work. Plagiarism is the passing off of someone else’s original work as your own.

I definitely think that there is probably fan fiction out there that a) plagiarizes and b) infringes. But I am not going to condemn an entire body of work based upon the individual pieces that may be unethical or may be violative of the copyright act just like I am not going to condemn the entire romance genre on the basis of work by Cassie Edwards or Janet Dailey.

I also think that there is fan fiction out there that is not infringing and would be considered transformative enough. I.e., I have thought that a work that …

Keishon blogged that JK Rowling was interviewed for Time Magazine and dropped hints of a possible 8th harry Potter book. She appears wistful about the end of the series and might not ready to let go. The 8th book would feature a different central character than Harry but set in the same world. Her daughter is requesting more books and that might provide a greater influence on Rowling than any other fan. After all, who doesn’t want to give their kids more stories?

Unfortunately, if there is another Potter book, it wouldn’t be for years. According to the Daily Mail report, Rowling said it would be ten years before a sequel would make an appearance.

Via Daily Mail by way of Avid Book Reader.

I just read on GalleyCat that some prime legal minds will be representing RDR in the defense of the Rowling copyright infringement lawsuit. If you aren’t up to date on this, the facts, briefly, shake out as follows:

Harry Potter Lexicon site starts up in 2000
Promotes Pottermania and is used by Rowling and Warner to promote Potter related stuff
Lexicon decides to publish book on Rowling stuff
Rowling files suit
Fandom is angry at RDR (Jane owes Random big post and will do so soon)
Jane looks up suit on Pacer and sees that RDR is a tiny company that is not well situated for a protracted legal battle with Rowling. Worries.

The RDR legal team now looks like this:

Lead Counsel: Ex-federal prosecutor David Hammer
Anthony Falzone, Stanford University’s Fair Use Project executive director.
Julie Ahrens, Stanford University’s Fair Use Project associate director
Lawrence Lessig, the author of Free Culture

I so hope that this goes to trial and is not settled because the legal precedence of this case could be vitally important to the measurement free use v. copyright.

The lawsuit by J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers was filed on October 31, 2007. Immediately thereafter, the district court judge entered an Order requiring the Lexicon publisher to show cause why an injunction shouldn’t be filed against it halting further production of the Lexicon book.

This is a case of David v. Goliath. Local counsel for RDR filed an informal memorandum with the court requesting a delay in the time of the briefing on the Preliminary Injunction due to RDR’s limited resources. It has no counsel on retainer and grosses less than $100,000.00 per year. The lawyer defending RDR, at this time, is a cousin of RDR’s owner who is not an Intellectual Property lawyer. The publisher agreed that it would halt all production until the case was decided and the court entered an order halting the Lexicon project.

I’m going to upload the trial court documents in a bit, but I wanted to let you know that Robin and I are going to engage in a mock debate on this issue. I’m going to argue the Rowling side of the case and Robin will argue the Lexicon side of the …

The great thing about being a children’s celebrity is that you can act like a jerk and the majority of your fans aren’t going to be the least bit aware. Rowlings non stop attempts to prevent anyone from doing anything that remotely resembles her work is becoming tiresome.

Last month, news of JK Rowling’s lawsuit against a organisers of a religious event in India based on a lifesize replica of Hogwarts Castle hit the news wire. This month, its a suit against RDR Books, a Michigan based publisher, who is set to publish a book based on information culled from the Harry Potter Lexicon. The Harry Potter Lexicon is a fansite established by former middle grade librarian, Steve Vander Ark. The site contains thousands of pages of information including plot summaries, news, essays, message boards, character and object listings, detailed quotations from interviews that provide backstory to the world of Harry Potter. The information is categorized and indexed making all of the factoids related to Potter easy to find.

These type of fan sites help to create and foster excitement about the series, particularly during the long waiting …

Whether it was JK Rowling coming clean or creating a media firestorm to whip up the Christian Conservative, in New York she revealed to a reading group that Dumbledore is gay.

Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald [a bad wizard he defeated long ago], and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him

Via Guardian.