O .. k … *insert ben wyatt gif*
I remember this case, vividly. I remember listening to LeakyCast when Melissa Anelli was reporting from outside the courtroom, in between sessions. I remember ALL the articles and yahoo group discussions. I became a 15yr old expert on US copyright law (which has actually been pretty useful since). Everyone was, we read a billion articles on Leaky and MuggleNet and all the legal fandom experts emerged to give their op-eds. JFC, I know JKR has done some problematic shit but this was not that.
The Lexicon was run/owned by Steve Vander Ark, but it had an army of volunteers who helped decipher/siphon that information from the books. Let’s not paint SVA as some kind of poor fandom martyr, because he was fully prepared to profit off the work of his fellow fans.
More importantly, this was about fair use under copyright law, which is a big grey area where the rest of transformative works sit. JKR famously didn’t pursue copyright infringement on fan sites, on fanfic, on fanart. Which meant fandom could be a freer space, a more open space. JKR’s tolerance levels paved the way for the fandoms we have now, big and loud and in public media spaces. When she acknowledged the Lexicon on her website, that was HUGE. (I’m pretty sure she later admitted — possibly during the trial itself — that she didn’t actually use the Lexicon herself because it wasn’t always correct, but she wanted to help publically legitimise fan behaviour.) She pursued copyright in this case because the book-format Lexicon was just repackaging her work. It wasn’t including essays or meta or fanart, it was just rewriting her words in an encyclopaedia format for one man’s profit. (I can’t emphasise that part enough, because it’s only occurring to me now in 2019. A community of fan collaboration to maintain the Lexicon, and he was going to profit off them too!). She didn’t request they take down the website, because as people have noted above, it still exists. She only asked that they did not profit from it, and when SVA pursued that, she took it to a legal sphere.
This case was a landmark case at the time for helping define the line for transformative works vs fair use copyright infringement. It was also a massively public moment for fandom; they talked about fansites in mainstream media, and I remember so many articles that were just playing for laughs/astonished at the idea that people would dedicate so much time to creating a free? Online? Encyclopaedia? For Harry Potter? JFC, we’ve come such a long way. And HP fandom was so relieved about the outcome, because people were so afraid they’d be chasing down fic writers next.
It’s on Wikipedia, friends, there are sources for this. Allow me to copy and paste:
“On 31 October 2007, Warner Bros. and Rowling sued Michigan-based publishing firm RDR Books to block the publication of a 400-page book version of the Harry Potter Lexicon, an online reference guide to her work.[57] Rowling, who previously had a good relationship with Lexicon owner Steve Vander Ark, reiterated on her website that she plans to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia, and that the publication of a similar book before her own would hurt the proceeds of the official encyclopedia, which she plans to give to charity.[58] A judge later barred publication of the book in any form until the case was resolved.[59] In their suit, Rowling’s lawyers also asserted that, as the book describes itself as a print facsimile of the Harry Potter Lexicon website, it would publish excerpts from the novels and stills from the films without offering sufficient “transformative” material to be considered a separate work.[60] The trial concluded on 17 April 2008.[61] On 8 September 2008, the judge ruled in her favour, claiming that the book would violate the terms of fair use.[62] In December, 2008, a modified (and shorter) version of Vander Ark’s Lexicon was approved for publication and was released 16 January 2009 as The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction.”
(The encyclopaedia she planned to publish became the free Pottermore, which has since been taken over by Warner Bros, because the internet has changed pretty radically in the last 12 years.)
Rewriting this as “author unjustly punishes fan” because we don’t like JKR anymore is also rewriting a really important part of OUR fandom history, as well as throwing in some new biases in the author vs fan arena. Let’s not do that.
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