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When an issue of copyright law turned into a discourse on the writer’s art

J.K. Rowling

New York: On the face of it, the case that was heard in Court 24A of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan promised to be a dry affair: a dispute over copyright between an author, and a publisher wanting to print an A to Z of her work. But things got interesting when the author, Joanne Rowling, admitted from the witness stand that she was holding back her tears. “I really don’t want to cry,” she said, “because I’m British.”

She may have sold millions of books and amassed a fortune that makes her a dollar billionaire (she is now worth £545 million), but when it came to giving legal evidence for the first time in her life, even Ms. Rowling found the experience humbling.

Amid the sombre wood panelling — shades of Hogwarts there — and under the eagle of American justice, she poured her heart out about her debt to the characters she created, and about her disdain for those she accuses of plundering her labours.

Ms. Rowling had flown in from Scotland to appear in person in a case in which she and Warner Bros, the studio behind the film adaptations of her Harry Potter books, are seeking to block the publication of an unauthorised encyclopaedia to the series. The defendant is a small publisher from Michigan, RDR Books, which wants to print the Lexicon, a 400-page Harry Potter guide to be priced at $24.95.

Called as the first witness, Ms. Rowling began by decrying what she called the “wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.” If words could kill, the author of the Lexicon, a former librarian called Steve Vander Ark, would be long gone. Ms. Rowling said the quality of his encyclopaedia was derisory, debasing and shameless, adding: “It’s sloppy, lazy and it takes my work wholesale.”

Later, she said the Lexicon was among the class of “profit-driven books that seek to jump on the bandwagon, lifting the facts that make up the Harry Potter world and reselling them.”

Under the direction of her counsel, Ms. Rowling gave a short account of her hard rise to fame, relating how she relied on welfare payments to see her through writing the first volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She recorded, too, the £8,000 granted to her by the Scottish Arts Council to pay for childcare: “At the time it was an absolute fortune.”

She was flabbergasted, she said, by the success of the books. But it was when she was asked by Cendali what Harry Potter meant to her that her eyes welled. “It means setting aside my children, everything.”

Did she care about how her characters are depicted? “Very, very deeply, yes. It’s my prime concern. Those characters meant so much to me over such a long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand what it means to create something. It’s the closest thing to having a child. Those characters saved me. Not just in a material sense — though they did do that. There was a time when they saved my sanity.”

Judge Robert Patterson, sitting without jury, looked a little bemused that a case on copyright law had turned into a discourse on the writer’s art. He will have to weigh up Rowling’s and Warner Bros’ desire to protect their intellectual property against the desire of RDR Books to publish what they see as a legitimate research tool.

The publisher’s lawyer praised the creative powers of Ms. Rowling but told the court that she was seeking to wield a different kind of power to “make the Lexicon disappear in our real world.”

There was plenty of detailed discussion of character and plot to delight Potter maniacs. Ms. Rowling complained that the Lexicon did not bother to record that the name Remus Lupin was a play on wolves, and that for her the character was partly an examination of the prejudice surrounding people with AIDS.

And she was scathing that Vander Ark had missed her reference to Occamy in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It was a reference to Occam’s razor, the principle that nothing should be presumed to exist if not absolutely necessary. A theory Judge Patterson will no doubt ponder hard in his judgment. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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