Lawyer Curses Potter Copyright Crimes

The professor who worked her legal magic to protect the creator of Harry Potter from copyright infringement discussed the differences between intellectual property online and in print at Harvard Law School at a panel event yesterday.

Visiting Professor Dale M. Cendali successfully argued before a New York court earlier this year that a Harry Potter fan Web site, whose content was slated to be published as a book, would have infringed upon J.K. Rowling’s creative rights as an author.

The site, “The Harry Potter Lexicon,” alphabetically indexes Harry Potter names and terms, from Hannah Abbott to “zoological column”—the Daily Prophet’s weekly zoological feature.

Cendali said that Rowling “sees the Internet as this vast book club, and lets her fans go for it.”

But the site’s creator, Steve Vander Ark, a Michigan librarian, was approached with a book deal by publisher RDR Books, and in print, Cendali said, Rowling has different standards.

Last Halloween, Warner Brothers and Rowling filed a copyright suit against the publisher, Cendali said.

“If books that plagiarize other works are permitted, authors, fans, and readers stand to lose,” Rowling said in court in April.

The print version of the lexicon would have been “a regurgitation in alphabetical order” of Rowling’s world, Cendali said, as she explained the author’s suit in the context of other intellectual property rulings.

According to Cendali, copyright infringements are judged on four main criteria: how the original work is used, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the original work used, and its effect on the market.

Because Vander Ark’s proposed book did not add original work to the Harry Potter series, Cendali argued, the site’s creator “took too much and did too little.”

On Sept. 8, Judge Robert Patterson of New York’s Southern District ruled in Rowling’s favor.

The Law School event was part of a five-person speaker series that the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology holds annually.

“I think it was fantastic,” said T. Gail Su, who organized the event as JOLT’s Speaker Editor. “We were really happy with the amount of turnout.”