Intellectual Property Law

Harry Potter and the Lexicon of Fair Use

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

No, it’s not the eighth installment of the Rowling series - rather, it’s the latest installment of the ongoing legal fistfight over RDR Books and Steven Vander Ark’s attempt to publish a book version of the on-line guide to the Harry Potter wizarding world. (I posted briefly on this earlier, when I was annoyed by clueless coverage of the case by the NY Times and Joe Nocera.) The trial in the case starts 9:30AM on 24 March before Judge Robert Patterson at courtroom 24 of the Moynihan Courthouse, 500 Pearl Street, in New York City. (Hat tip to Lauren Gelman of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society for the information, and to Fred von Lohmann for distributing it.)

In short:

• the plaintiffs claim the Lexicon violates Rowling’s copyrights in her novels and that the book’s cover blurb with her praise of the Web site violates federal and NY state trademark law;
• the defendants respond that the book doesn’t infringe Rowling’s copyrights and, even if it did, it’s protected by fair use, and also that there’s no TM violation;
• I think the book infringes Rowling’s copyrights, that the use isn’t fair, that the trademark claim is weak, that the plaintiffs will win on the copyright claim, and that this outcome is a good thing.
• Documents are available from the Justia search engine and also from the CIS Fair Use Project site. (Props to Brandy Karl for the links, though she’ll disagree vehemently with my reasoning.)

See below the jump for my analysis on the copyright issues. (I’ll defer the TM analysis for a day or so since I’m technically still on spring break and already feel like a nerd for writing this much.)

Full post as published by Info/Law on March 15, 2008 (boomark / email).