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Victory for Rowling and Harry Potter

by Sally Andersen

It was the lawsuit filing heard ’round the fiction book world: Author J. K. Rowling, with the support of Warner Bros. Entertainment, filed suit against a blogger and small publisher who were preparing to publish a Harry Potter-based encyclopedia.

Michigan publishing house RDR Books probably thought they’d been handed a goldmine when blogger Steven Vander Ark came to them in hopes of turning his online rantings into The Harry Potter Lexicon. For some reason, no one at RDR saw it as a problem that Potter author Rowling had not OK’d it.

Legal proceeding took place to put a stop to the knock-off publication, and Monday, September 8, a ruling was announced: Rowling won. The judge awarded her and her publisher $6,750 in statutory damages and permanently blocked the book from publication.

In response to winning her case, Rowling released this statement:

“I took no pleasure at all in bringing legal action and am delighted that this issue has been resolved favourably. I went to court to uphold the right of authors everywhere to protect their own original work. The court has upheld that right.

“The proposed book took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own. Now the court has ordered that it must not be published.

“Many books have been published which offer original insights into the world of Harry Potter. The Lexicon just is not one of them.”

Rowling had previously praised Ark’s Web site, and took no legal action against it remaing online. She has acknowledge plans to release an official encyclopedia on Harry Potter’s world, but no word yet as to when fans can expect it.


Posted in Bestsellers, The Business Side on September 9th, 2008

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