Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

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 …