Several public figures have voiced their opinions on the JKR/WB vs. RDR Books court case:
Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer Orson Scott Card claims that J.K. Rowling’s “hypocrisy is so thick” that he “can hardly breathe”.
He goes on to say:
“Once you publish fiction, Ms. Rowling, anybody is free to write about it, to comment on it, and to quote liberally from it, as long as the source is cited.”
He predicts the outcome of the case:
“1. Publication of Lexicon will go on without any problem or prejudice, because it clearly falls within the copyright law’s provision for scholarly work, commentary and review.
2. Rowling will be forced to pay Steven Vander Ark’s legal fees, since her suit was utterly without merit from the start.
3. People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE: With regard to Mr. Card’s statement that a published work of fiction may be written about or quoted “as long as the source is cited”, note that plaintiffs JKR/WB’s claim that the Lexicon book fails to properly quote or cite Ms. Rowling’s works. Exact testimony regarding such is available here in the trial transcripts).
Game show Jeopardy! wiz Ken Jennings writes about the trial on his blog in an entry entitled “Harry Potter and the Glossary of Doom”. He says:
“Books like The Harry Potter Lexicon are nothing new. When I was a kid, I had a bunch of unlicensed glossaries like these on my shelves: Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance, etc. (Both of these books may later have been approved by their respective marketing empires, I’m not sure, but they were strictly fan-pub back then.) Even today, you can walk up to the TV/Movies shelf in a Barnes & Noble and find cash-in essay collections and reference works analyzing Lost, Firefly, The West Wing, and other hits. All these books profit by putting the Big Media Brand Name front and center on their covers–without the pop-culture teat, they wouldn’t sell a single copy. Profiteers, right, “Jo”? Burn them all!”
Jennings also notes:
”...the plagiarism claims are silly. Direct quotes from the books are rare, and are used only in epigrammatic fashion. Rowling may be referring to the fact that the Lexicon does faithfully describe facts and events from her series, and at length, but that’s an inevitable feature of any reference book. The literary references all look legitimate to me, as if due care has been taken to rephrase them away from Rowling’s language.”
On the subject of companion books, he says:
“In a free society, it’s good that people can talk and write freely about art. Good things come out of a society being able to talk and write freely about art–whether the artist likes it or not. Fan-published “derivative works” are a tiny legal niche, but they’re not an entirely unimportant one. Maybe you’re a Gilmore Girls fan who’d love to see an index annotating and explaining the show’s dense web of cultural references, or a U2 fan working on a complete concordance to their lyrics, or a Spider-Man fan with an issue-by-issue chronology of his Marvel Comics-owned “life” on your website. This stuff is going to keep disappearing if the legal precedents keep following the Twin Peaks and Castle Rock path.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE: With regard to Mr. Jennings’ statement that literary references are legitimate if “due care has been taken to rephrase them away from Rowling’s language”, note plaintiffs JKR/WB’s claim that the Lexicon book too frequently uses JKR’s exact language. Exact testimony regarding such is available here in the trial transcripts).
On the 24th, Mr. Gaiman’s clarifies fair use for a reader of his blog with:
“As far as I can see it’s only about a couple of really grey areas of copyright law—I suspect, and I am SO not a lawyer, that it will come down to whether or not what Mr Vander Ark had done to Ms Rowling’s work in his Lexicon was sufficiently “transformative” as to render it a new work.”
He offers as an example:
“If someone did a website in which everything in Sandman is listed in alphabetical order, as a concordance or lexicon… whether or not I was going to do one doesn’t matter. Whether or not someone else is making money off my work and words and ideas doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a good lexicon or a bad lexicon doesn’t matter. Whether it quotes me extensively may or may not matter (how extensively I’m quoted is a matter of Fair Use, but paraphrase me and you are home and dry on that count). What matters is whether it sufficiently transforms what I’ve done into something else by taking those entries and putting them into alphabetical order. “
Today, Mr. Gaiman writes a follow up on copyright, in which he posts a letter sent to him by one of his readers, a lawyer who co-authored a paper on fair use for the Journal of the Copyright Society of the United States. Leaky readers may find the letter informative.
Thanks as always to our readers who have emailed or posted links to articles or editorials on the trial.
Ken Jennings holds the record for the most Jepardy wins (74) with winnings of more that $2 million. As Jepardy is a game show for brainiacs, he is sort of the quintessential brainiac. I’ve seen a few interviews with him and he seems to be a pretty nice guy.
I don’t believe anyone is calling Orson Scott Card a Harry Potter hater. I believe they’re calling him a bitter, misinformed ass. Which he is. Just read his comments.
Card contributed to The Great Snape Debate? Oh man! I wish I had remembered that before I wrote that comment!
“i’m suprised by all the negativity towards Jo about this. and the fact that people are being sexist makes no sense either. is it just because she’s a girl she can’t keep someone else from making money off of what she’s spent her life on for almost 20 years? i support Jo.”
Posted by maryhappyface on April 25, 2008 @ 11:44 PM
I think you’ve hit on a very relevant point. If she was a man, he wouldn’t be calling the man “evil.” When woman stands up for herself in the business world, she’s a word that rhymes with “witch.” When a man does it, he’s dynamic and strong.
I guess I’ll read Jenning’s blog now. I’ve read the other two. I had take a break from the crazy.
Marlena—You’re telling me that Card used to be such a fan of Harry Potter that he contributed to SnapeCast and The Great Snape Debate (I don’t know what those are, but it says something that he, a famous author, contributed to them)? And now suddenly we have him denouncing JKR as a greedy witch (because founding charities and donating to them is so greedy, isn’t it?). I find this highly suspicious. I believe that he is either a) engaging in a desperate publicity stunt, b) sore that Dumbledore is gay (Mr. Card is outspokenly anti-gay, and has gone so far as to state that homosexuality should be punishable by law), or c) simply jealous of JKR’s superior talent (this would explain his attempt to compare his trivial little tales to Harry Potter). Whatever the case, I find it impossible to believe that a mere copyright lawsuit could by itself move Card to make such venomous, misrepresentative comments about someone whom, as little as a year ago, he apparently quite liked.
Although I may not agree with everything Card or Kennings said, I have to say I’m a little disappointed in some of the comments I’m reading here on Leaky. The negativity is very off putting. If you feel Card was out of line by calling JKR names then go ahead, express your opinion. (By the way I do think he was a little overzealous with the comparisons but anyone who has read his articles in the past will realize that’s just the way he writes.) But when you start calling him names in return and making over-generalized comments based on a quick google of his name, it doesn’t exactly make you seem much better than him. I’ve always viewed this website as a positive place but lately it’s just been a lot of name calling and whining. I love to read everyone’s opinions but I’m starting to get sick of the bashing. Just remember those two men have access to the same information as everyone else and they came to their own conclusions. They made some of the same fallacies many of the people here have made. I personally think that in this case there is no right or wrong. Both sides have many good points and I honestly wish that a compromise could be made. The only thing I see for sure is a lot of overly eager fans (and, I suppose, non-fans) of the books expressing a lot of polarized opinions without backing them up. When did leaky become a breeding ground for wannabe lawyers and angry fans, who a year ago were impatiently waiting for the last book? I want that leaky back and until this case is over and “resolved” I think I’ll get my HP fix somewhere else.
@ Cam: Nope, sorry, I’m not going to feel bad for expressing my opinion of Mr. Card’s remarks. He has a right to his opinion, but I also have a right to be disgusted at the childish and vicious way he has chosen to express himself.
And as for Mr. Jennings, I don’t think anyone has insulted him except to say, “Ken Jennings? Who? The Jeopardy guy? And why exactly is a former game show contestant publicly weighing in on this?” I don’t call that bashing. I call it a valid question.
Good luck finding another place for your HP fix, though.
Mr. Card continues to prove that his arrogance again gets in the way of rational thinking. Sadly, he believes himself to be the most righteous entity in the writing universe.
His opinion makes it clear that he knows little about this case. He probably formed it from reading a report on CNN.
This really pains me as Enders Game is one of the greatest novels of all time.
isnt it amazing how people open their mouths spitting out ignorance? They say ‘shame on Jo’ and state that she’s greedy and wrong to own her work. They make statements such as ‘its free if you quote’, while as noted, the whole issue (and they would have known this had they done the research) is that the book apparently does NOT quote.
At the same time, even if they say it’s fair and can win (and I hope not), it begets a whole host of problems. What right can it be said that music, and movies, are wholly copyrighted, yet books cannot? All are forms of art, and all need to be protected. One cannot discriminate. And if this is deemed fair in relation to books, when can we now see it for movies? Can we look forward to seeing duplicate movies of a subject, using the same lines?
If the current law says its okay to for Steve and RDR to do as they have, and they win, then I hope WB/Jo DO appeal, and make the effort to get the law changed. The law is outdated and in this technological age needs to be updated.
It takes a LONG time to work on art (be it novel, movie, music, etc) and it should not be discounted.
Ah, I read some of the other comments. This seems to be another midlist writer who’s letting his bitterness about Rowling’s success cloud his judgment.
Once again Orson opens mouth and inserts foot. The proposed Lexicon book is NOT about commentary or analysation. The book is nothing more then a dictionary format of Jo’s work. Jo should have the RIGHT to make her own Encyclopedia first and when she wants to. She shouldn’t have to be forced to compete for her own works revelavance.
OSC seems to have a very bad habit of making judgement calls on things he knows very little about.
It is so tiring to continually read the “fandom” dismissing the intricate dissection of JKR’s world of Harry Potter and then its alphabetical reassortment as nothing but “cut and paste,” which is an uninformed and lazy assessment of the Lexicon book. “Fair Use” under the law allows for a transformative use to be directed toward children – the Harry Potter books are ostensibly marketed as children’s literature, after all – and in such a case, alphabetizing an entire magical world could, in fact, be very transformative, whether you choose to accept that or not.
The “91% plagarism” line is uninformed as well, and a bit of a red herring. Anyone that has actually looked into “fair use” case study knows that the acceptible percentage of materials used in the infriging book refers to the percentage of the original material that is being copied – NOT the percentage of material contained in the infringing book. In other words, the law looks at the amount of Rowling’s material that appears in the Lexicon as compared to the total amount of material Rowling has produced that the Lexicon draws from, not the total number of infriging pages that the Lexicon contains. I’d think that a 400 page book would, by neccessity, contain a limited amount of copyrighted material from the thousands of Potter pages Rowling has published. While the fandom is free to accept the WB argument of “taking too much and doing too little,” there is another valid argument made on RDR’s behalf in their pre-trial filings that says that even 100% of the Lexicon could be infringing and still fall under fair use, if the work is transformative.
Generally speaking, for the “fandom” to speak en masse as if they are so much more intelligent and insightful than the legal minds behind the defense (and the judge, for that matter) in this case is embarrassing.
“Due care has been taken to rephrase them away from Rowling’s language.”
To bring this statement into the Harry Potter world, if I may, what we need is a Ministry for the Historical Preservation of the Boy Who Lived, and a Minister that has deep connections into the Wizengamut. The bar should be set higher, I’m afraid, than what some of those who have commented, as noted in this article, seem to maintain. There just may be some things in life that don’t need to be transformed; there needs to be a Harry Potter historical district. And, although the gentleman lawyer that submitted a letter to Mr. Gaiman suggests such a thing as a “weak” copyright, does that apply to the case at hand, where the defendants are re-presenting copyrighted material and has yet to establish that there is an “original work” somewhere of his own to hold onto? That same letter suggests that creativity might be stifled, but again, I suggest that J. K. Rowling has covered that one too, and you, sir, are looking right at it; you are looking out at all of us. Creativity abounds, and we fans have yet to lock up the Harry Potter series into a brick and barred book depository, to charge for the storage of books on shelves, only to require another token for admission. We save those kinds of capitalist ideas for theme parks like “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter!”
Without sounding obtuse, I have yet to see anyone believeably argue that any published material, beyond what J. K. Rowling has done, including already published materials, fall into a protected “scholarly” category. Not being obtuse as it sounds, I know that those things are out there, or could be out there, however, it is hard to imagine something like that when one takes time to realize that the “academic” material is stemming from a work of fiction as colorful as “Dobby wearing knitted clothes.” One could go back in time, like I did this week, while watching a History Channel program about the Philosopher’s Stone (and Harry Potter), and find that Nicolas Flamel was a storied French alchemist. Yet, on the other hand, it is alphabetized in the Lexicon, under “F,” where one finds the Lexicon “said that” J. K. Rowling “said that” Nicolas Flamel lived in France and was supposed to have discovered something. Did Harry Potter culminate from literary works about Nicolas Flamel? Or are the character’s Harry, Ron, and Hermione trademarkable, as suggested within Neil Gaiman’s blog? Oh, the confusion, until one proposes something such as this: What if J. K. Rowling’s work on Harry Potter is actually her own scholarly work based upon an assortment of historical and literary “items,” the very purpose of which is to make all of those things digestible to all readers alike? In that case the actual documented history about Nicolas Flamel was very interesting to hear about, and J. K. Rowling’s perspective was “creative” and “transformative.” I wonder if Mr. Flamel, may he rest in peace, would Google through the Lexicon to find things that are written under “F.”
I wish Jo and Steve could settle out of court and collaborate on a really great HP lexicon… that would really be something. This being said… poor Steve is just an enthusiastic HP fan like us… I’m sure RDR is actually the one on whom we should be placing any blame.
I’m sick of this. Why does something so good have to be the center of such nastiness? I’ll be back one day.
And generally speaking, for the “SVA supporters” to speak en masse as if they are so much more intelligent and insightful than the legal minds behind the prosecution (and the judge, for that matter) in this case is embarrassing.
SVA may have put a lot of time and effort into alphabetizing Jo’s work, but it does not make his book transformative, whether you choose to accept that or not.
(It’s annoying when someone paraphrases you, isn’t it?)
Ken Jennings holds the record for the most Jepardy wins (74) with winnings of more that $2 million. As Jepardy is a game show for brainiacs, he is sort of the quintessential brainiac. I’ve seen a few interviews with him and he seems to be a pretty nice guy.