HARRY POTTER - POTTER "LEXICON" VIOLATED COPYRIGHT, JUDGE RULES

POTTER "LEXICON" VIOLATED COPYRIGHT, JUDGE RULES

Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling have praised a ruling by a federal judge in New York that effectively halted the publication of a reference guide to the Harry Potter novels by RDR Books. The guide is based on Steven Vander Ark's website, The Harry Potter Lexicon. Judge Robert P. Patterson ruled that the guide violates the Potter copyrights. "I went to court to uphold the right of authors everywhere to protect their own original work. The court has upheld that right," Rowling said in a statement. In his 68-page opinion, the judge took note of the fact that Vander Ark had previously received "positive feedback" about the website from Rowling herself, who confessed that she had periodically checked it out while writing her books for particular facts that she had forgotten. She had referred to it as "my natural home," he observed. The judge also noted that Warner Bros. had invited Vander Ark to the set of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , where producer David Heyman told him that the film's writers had used his website "almost every day." However, Patterson observed, the book uses "a troubling amount" of quotations from the book, sometimes with quotation marks, "but more often the original language is copied without quotation marks, often making it difficult to know which words are Rowling's and which are Vander Ark's."

09/09/2008