Court rules Harry Potter Lexicon infringed J.K. Rowling’s copyright

I’ve been vindicated. I wrote on April 14 that I thought J.K. Rowling’s lawsuit for copyright infringement against the author of a Harry Potter Lexicon would prevail because the case was so much like another, Castle Rock Entertainment Group v. Carol Publishing, Inc., where the court ruled that a trivia book based on the characters and events of the Seinfeld television series infringed the copyrights held by the producers of the TV show.

Yesterday, a federal judge in New York City ruled in J.K. Rowling’s favor and blocked publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon because Rowling’s lawyers had established that the lexicon copied too much directly from the novels.

The court in the Seinfeld case ruled that the author of the trivia book based on the TV series had merely repackaged the “facts” of the series in a different way. Similarly, the Harry Potter Lexicon was merely a repackaging of material from the Harry Potter books. Apparently, the lexicon’s entries copied verbatim substantial parts of the book.

It has been said again and again, and rightly, that determining whether a new work that takes material from a copyrighted work infringes the copyright or is non-infringing “fair use” is exceedingly difficult and almost always depends on the particular facts of the case.

Cases like Rowling’s and the Seinfeld case turn, nevertheless, primarily on two issues: how much is copied and how much does the work constitute original, “transformative,” work — that is, how much is the new work something original unto itself rather than merely a repackaging of the old work. Thus, if one commenter to my April 14 post had been right — that the Harry Potter Lexicon, as its “author” had claimed, had contained substantial amounts of commentary without substantial outright copying — the Lexicon might have been non-infringing fair use. As the decision now stands, however (it may be appealed), the lexicon seemed to be too much repackaged copying and too little independent work. Certainly, that is J.K. Rowling’s view. She was quoted after the decision saying, “The proposed book took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own. … Many books have been published which offer original insights into the world of Harry Potter. The Lexicon just is not one of them.”