JKR's suit against RDR Books

[pegkerr]

I'm really sorry to hear about all this. I certainly like the Harry Potter Lexicon, and I consider Steve Vander Ark a personal friend; Rob and I worked with him on the HPEF Board of Directors. But geez, if praetorianguard is correct about the sequence of events, then as a holder of copyrights myself, I have to agree with praetorianguard. I don't think that RDR Books or Steve have a legal leg to stand on, and they're gonna lose this case. As well they should. No matter how much they bluster.

Personally, I am going to find this all extremely painful to watch.

(A good chunk of the complaint and quite a bit of discussion over at The Leaky Cauldron here.)

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Holy COW, these people are stupid. You answer. You answer courteously.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Yessss, that was my thought. And you try to work out a compromise. Is the profit a problem? What if we donate to charity? Is the material a problem? Ah, you're doing your own encyclopedia. Can we work out some sort of deal where we give you our material and you give us partial credit, a payment as freelancers, something? After all, the book's already written, all you'd have to do is make changes/annotations.

[pinguthegreek.livejournal.com]

But.....but..but...she wants to write about the world she created. Her world. Whereas he's taken it from the books. Just gone through the books and notated all the information down. Why on earth would she take help from someone else ? I accept the point that her story has ended up being inconsistent, but it is her world.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that she would accept it, but that the response from the Lexicon people should have been to seek a compromise. There are plenty of authors who have accepted that assistance from people in creating companion books for their world (Anne McCaffrey leaps to mind). And why retread when someone has done all the heavy lifting for you? There are the resources, ready-made and drawn from your own material. You correct them where they're wrong, add material so people will pay for it, rejigger into your own style, and boom.

I'm looking at it from the commercial perspective of someone who writes medical textbooks on a tight deadline for a living -- we always use material that already exists where possible. Heck, the fiction author in me would be willing to accept fan help if it were forthcoming, because fans are, in general, much more exacting with details than the author of the original material.

If she wants to write about it, then hey, that would be a no, right? It's not like she has anything else she has to do (like work for a living ever again).