How Great A Victory For J.K. Rowling?

J.K. Rowling: Winning the battle, but not the way she hoped.
Daniel Barry, Getty Images

You may have heard that on Monday, a federal judge stopped publication of a Harry Potter fan's reference guide to the series. J.K. Rowling herself appeared to testify — rather dramatically — about the agony she would suffer if the unofficial guide were to be published. There was a fine discussion of the case on Talk Of The Nation yesterday, which lays out the basics.

What's interesting about the case, and you can read the judge's decision for yourself, is how Rowling won the case while losing the basic argument she was making.

The author's argument throughout the case, at least in her public statements, was that she was entitled to control the use of her characters and books, and that it was unfair to allow anyone else to capitalize on it.

She explained that she wanted to write a reference guide for charity and said, "I cannot, therefore, approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to pre-empt my definitive Potter reference book for their authors' own personal gain."

This kind of sweeping "my books; my reference guides" theory was not embraced by the judge, whose decision was far narrower.

Two things got Steve Vander Ark, the writer of the lexicon at issue here, in the most trouble: he quoted and paraphrased too much of the books directly in writing his encyclopedia entries, and he not only created a reference guide to the information in the novels; he created a reference guide to two companion books — really encyclopedias themselves — that Rowling had created to further explain aspects of the novels.

What would make a reference book less dangerous? After the jump...

To the degree that the case shaped up as a referendum on Rowling's me-first theory — the argument that if she wanted to write an encyclopedia to the Potter books, nobody else could write one first and make money from her characters — she emphatically lost the argument.

The judge pointed out that "the market for reference guides to the Harry Potter works is not exclusively hers to exploit or license, no matter the commercial success attributable to the popularity of the original works."

If the encyclopedia at issue here had summarized the information in the books without quoting or barely paraphrasing Rowling's own language (often without indicating direct quotations), and if it had stuck to the novels rather than including the companion books, it's not clear that Rowling would have won. While she lost won her argument against this specific book, she lost in her bid to establish her right to create the "definitive" Harry Potter guide.

The judge made clear that reference guides to novels are allowed. Others can make money by commenting on, further explaining, or elaborating on an author's characters and stories.

Vander Ark lost this case by a fairly thin margin; the case was not the blow to fan-created art, fiction, and other expansions on an author's work that it could have been. This guy lost this time, but in a sense, everyone else who might one day want to write about the Harry Potter books won.

-- Linda Holmes