[A2k] Re: Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times: Humility and Harry Potter

[Heather Ford]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
Great article - thanks, Thiru!
On 21 Apr 2008, at 1:26 PM, Thiru Balasubramaniam wrote:

>
> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/866b4288-0dac-11dd-b90a-0000779fd2ac.html
>
> Humility and Harry Potter
>
> By Christopher Caldwell
>
> Published: April 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: April 19 2008 03:00
>
> "We all know I've made enough money," said J.K. Rowling, the
> author, in a courtroom in New York City this week. "That's
> absolutely not why I'm here."
>
> It is not obvious, though, why she was there. Along with Warner
> Brothers Entertainment, Ms Rowling is suing RDR Books, a small,
> respected publisher in rural Muskegon, Michigan, to enjoin it from
> selling an A-to-Z guide to Ms Rowling's seven Harry Potter books.
> This "lexicon" would be based on an online guide compiled over the
> past decade by Steven Vander Ark in the hours he could spare from
> his job as a librarian at a Christian junior high school near
> Muskegon.
>
> The case has become a battle over the limits of copyright law and a
> window on the ties that bind celebrities to their more obsessive fans.
>
> The gravamen of Ms Rowling's and Warner Brothers' argument is
> clear. Mr Vander Ark's book "is not a reference book or scholarly
> critique", they claim, and it lacks "any originality or invention".
> Ms Rowling has praised Mr Vander Ark's website, but calls the book
> that will draw from it "wholesale theft". Her attorneys note that
> "Ms Rowling has allowed fans and scholars wide latitude to comment
> on, critique, and even create 'fan fiction' and art based on her
> stories". But of course, nobody in a free country requires authors'
> permission to comment on or critique their work.
>
> Lawyers at Stanford University Law School's Fair Use Project, who
> are defending Mr Vander Ark pro bono, sought to show in three days
> of testimony this week that the Lexicon constitutes "fair use" of
> Ms Rowling's work. It is a reference guide, of the sort that is
> familiar (and indispensable) to anyone who has taken a deeper
> interest in Balzac, Proust, Faulkner or Star Trek . Ms Rowling
> "appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary
> reference guides and other non-academic research relating to her
> own fiction", according to Mr Vander Ark's lawyer. Joe Nocera, The
> New York Times business writer, puts it even more bluntly. He has
> called Ms Rowling a "copyright hog".
>
> Whether the lexicon violates "fair use" depends, according to US
> legal experts, on whether it is "transformative" or whether it just
> cribs from Ms Rowling's plot and prose. Much of the testimony
> missed this issue. Ms Rowling dwelt on her own plans to publish a
> Potter encyclopaedia, which is neither here nor there. Literary
> critics cannot be kept from writing about, let us say, the novels
> of Philip Roth on the grounds that Mr Roth swears he wants to
> publish a book called What My Novels Mean . The fact that Mr Vander
> Ark would profit from his lexicon is a red herring, too. Provided
> he is within the boundaries of "fair use", there is nothing
> illegitimate about his profiting from his work, any more than it is
> illegitimate that book reviewers be paid if they cite the books
> they review. Ms Rowling also demeaned the quality of Mr Vander
> Ark's book, which is legally irrelevant. Apparently some puns she
> was particularly proud of, including a "double allusion" in the
> name Remus Lupin, went over his head. She came off as condescending
> ("It's very difficult for someone who is not a writer to
> understand"), self-involved (the suit, she said, "has really
> decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month") and
> mean.
>
> Meanwhile, Mr Vander Ark's admiration for Ms Rowling's
> "genius" (his word) remains slavish. Although he refers to her as
> "Jo" on his website, the two had never met before this week. He has
> read the Potter books dozens of times and recently moved to
> England, where he has written a book about the places that inspired
> the Potter series. Even after Ms Rowling filed the suit against his
> publisher last October, he signed his online postings "still Jo's
> man, through and through". When asked in court this week if he
> still felt like a member of the "Harry Potter community", he began
> to sob.
>
> Whatever the court decides on legal grounds, one need only spend
> five minutes at Mr Vander Ark's website ( hp-lexicon.org ) to see
> that, on literary grounds, the idea that he is merely cribbing is
> nonsense. The website is highly transformative. It is a leviathan
> effort of research, criticism and interpretation. It is a
> concordance, index and bibliographical essay all in one. If the
> eventual book bears the slightest resemblance to it, it will be
> indispensable to scholars and lay Potter addicts. It gives
> timelines of the novels and points up inconsistencies in them. Its
> section on plants describes the uses and behaviour of fluxweed,
> honking daffodils and whomping willows, and reconstructs seven
> years of the "herbology" curriculum at Hogwarts. It indexes
> everything Ms Rowling has ever said in published interviews about
> her main characters. (At World Book Day in 2004, if you'd care to
> know, she hinted that Harry might be a relative of Godric
> Gryffindor, the wizard and Hogwarts founder.) It links to 137
> literary essays about the Potter series from around the English-
> speaking world, some of them superb. It debunks hoaxes and rumours
> that have swirled around the series and its author. It links to
> bookstores. Such a site is not just a godsend to Potter addicts. It
> is thanks to readers such as Mr Vander Ark that Harry Potter is
> taken as something more than just a particularly good children's book.
>
> Celebrities and their fans exist in an awkward mutual dependence.
> Maybe Ms Rowling, paradoxically, is a victim of her relatively
> private lifestyle and her unlikely road from single motherhood to
> fame. She has a Hollywood star's relationship to her public, but
> less practice than the average Hollywood star, perhaps, in hiding
> impatience. She remains a writer with an admirable work ethic, a
> magnificent gift for characterisation and plot, and a rich and
> inventive vocabulary - even if the word "humility" does not figure
> in it.
>
> The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Thiru Balasubramaniam
> Geneva Representative
> Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
> thiru@keionline.org
>
>
> Tel: +41 22 791 6727
> Mobile: +41 76 508 0997
>
>
>
>

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