Legal News

No Fair Use: Rowling Wins Copyright Spat Over H.P. Lexicon

By Dan Slater

Just in: After four months of deliberating, Judge Robert Patterson has ruled that the H.P. Lexicon infringes J.K. Rowling’s copyright in the Harry Potter series.

According to the AP, Judge Patterson granted an injunction, ruling that Rowling had proven that Steven Vander Ark’s “Harry Potter Lexicon” would cause her irreparable harm as a writer.

The suit, filed late last year against RDR Books, an independent publishing house in Michigan, alleged that plans by Michigan-based publisher RDR to publish a print edition of the Harry Potter Lexicon, a Web site that serves as a rather daunting compendium of all things Harry, violated Warner and Rowling’s copyright and takes away the future market for a similar compendium that Rowling plans to write.

Here’s the opinion.

Judge Patterson ruled in Rowling’s favor because the “Lexicon appropriates too much of Rowling’s creative work for its purposes as a reference guide.” He also wrote that, “While the Lexicon, in its current state, is not a fair use of the Harry Potter works, reference works that share the Lexicon’s purpose of aiding readers of literature generally should be encouraged rather than stifled.”

Ethan Horwitz, an IP lawyer at King & Spalding, told the Law Blog: “What Judge Patterson is saying is that when you look at fair use, one of the dominant issues is, are you providing commentary or taking the value of the work and selling it as your own? He decided that the value of the work was being taken, that [Rowling] had the ability to put out the kind of encyclopedia that [Vander Ark] was putting out, and that she’d indicated an intent to do so.”

O’Melveny’s Dale Cendali repped Rowling and Warner Bros.

David Hammer, a solo practitioner in Manhattan, took the lead for RDR. He got help from Stanford Law School’s Anthony Falzone — a former Bingham McCutcheon litigator and the heir apparent to Lawrence Lessig’s Fair Use Project and Lizbeth Hasse, of San Francisco’s Creative Industry Law Group.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).