Harry Potter : The Boy Who Survived a Lawsuit

THE Harry Potter saga is undoubtedly a historical event in the world of book publishing. Spanning over seven novels, J.K. Rowling’s chronicle of a boy wizard’s adventure in a magical school is an epic that is nothing less than a modern time equivalent to Homer’s ‘Odyssey’.

One of the Harry Potter book. (Source: Google images)

Nevertheless, Harry Potter is not perfect and had been in the middle of some high profile court cases in regards to copyright infringement over the years. Back in 2000, Rowling was accused of stealing her infamous Potter magic from a writer called Nancy Stouffer, landing her in the hot seat in court. According to CNN.com (2000), Stouffer claims that there are too many similarities between the Potter series and a book she wrote in 1984. She sued Rowling and Scholastic, the U.S. publisher of the Potter books, as well as Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.

"The Legend of Rah and the Muggles" by N. Stouffer. The book that Rowling was accused of copying from. (Source: Google images)

Recently, Harry Potter is once against involved in a lawsuit involving copyright infringement. However, this time around the table was turned. It was Rowling who are defending her rights to the idea behind Harry Potter. Rowling sued Steven Vander Ark, the publisher of Harry Potter Lexicon (HPL) as he plan to publish an encyclopedia on Harry Potter and the magical world she had created. HPL began as a web encyclopedia of the magical world that is Harry potter and is known as the ultimate fan guide.

The Harry Potter Lexicon website.

For Vander Ark it was a tragic tale because after toiling for seven years on his guidebook the federal judge had ruled that his book was too close to Rowling’s best selling series. The lawsuit was on the basis that there were too many lexicon texts that had been taken from the Harry Potter novel without proper citation. Rowling was said to have accused Vander Ark’s book as a rearrangement of her own material. Thus, due to the similarities of situational context as mentioned by Paltridge (2000), Rowling’s claim was seen as valid.

The lawsuit ended in September 2008 with Rowling as the victor and in the process invoking the a ban on the publishing of the Harry Potter Lexicon book as a method of protecting the author’s right to defend their original work (BBC news, 2008).

Steven Vander Ark was found guilty under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act (1988). He then tried to repeal the verdict via the ‘fair-use’ principle, which allow for the reproduction of some of the original work to achieve one’s purposes (Stanford, 2007). However, the portion of direct quotations used in the Lexicon book was just too much.


References

BBC News: Rowling Wins Book Copyright Claim 2008, viewed on 10th June 2009, from <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7605142.stm >.

CNN.com 2000, Burden of proof: the Harry Potter book lawsuit, viewed on 9th June 2009, <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0007/05/bp.00.html>.

Paltridge,B 2000, ‘Genre Analysis’, Making Sense of Discourse Analysis, Antipodean Educational Enterprise, Gold Coast.

Stanford: Copyright &Fair Use 2007, viewed on 10th June 2009, from <fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html>.