Baby Talk
Judge Robert Patterson, who is presiding over the Harry Potter Lexicon case, has described J.K. Rowling’s work as gibberish, which I find hilarious, if inaccurate. Here’s the short London Times article by Kevin Dowling.
J. K. Rowling heard her work described as “gibberish” by a US judge yesterday at the end
of a three-day trial into an unauthorised encyclopaedia of her Harry Potter novels.
Rowling has asked the federal court in New York to block publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a guide to the characters, places and spells in her novels, written by Steven Vander Ark, 50, a former school librarian.
District Judge Robert Patterson Jr said that he had read the first half of the first Harry Potter novel to his grandchildren, but found the “magical world hard to follow, filled with strange names and words that would be gibberish in any other context.
“I found it extremely complex,” he said, suggesting that a reference guide might be useful.
Rowling said she was “vehemently anti-censorship; and generally supportive of the right of other authors to write books about her novels”. But she said Vander Ark had “plundered” her prose and merely reprinted it in an A-to-Z format.
A decision in the case is not expected soon. It will be weeks before lawyers finish filing documents, and possibly longer before a verdict is given. Judge Patterson is deciding the case, rather than a jury.
However, what is much less funny is people’s reactions to this comment. On the page of this same article, people have gone on about religion, about stupid Americans and attention spans, and all manner of comments that really have nothing to do with the core of the case. The facts are that this is a case about whether or not Steven Vander Ark has used Rowling’s own words to define her own words, and is therefore plagiarizing. I don’t think that it is possible for the public to have a view on this case since we, none of us, have the offending text in hand. Since the public obviously can’t keep its head on about what’s important in the case, how can they expect the judge to? And so much the worse for Rowling’s lawyers. Both sides have brought in very similar witnesses to be naysayers and supporters, but we just don’t know what Vander Ark’s book looks like. But I do think that it’s fair for the Lexicon to use quoted form the book, but for the information to be fair use in the way, say a book on Woolf’s Between the Acts might be, the texts must be treated in a scholarly manner. But that’s all I can say… except that at least one of the commenters has called Rowling’s books “brilliant” and while I enjoyed them and found them easy reads, “brilliant” is certainly stretching a point. It’s not Shakespeare, people. The Telegraph’s Sam Leith phrases it nicely when he says that:
JK Rowling complains that Mr Vander Ark has “plundered” her prose and reproduced it in an A-Z format. That is – at the extreme end of it – precisely what a concordance does. I have sympathy with Rowling’s hurt feelings – in particular because she has announced plans to produce her own encyclopedia, and I can understand that Warner Brothers is keen to put down a legal marker of some sort.
But this would put down a legal marker of the wrong sort. It should remain clearly legitimate for people to publish, and profit from, scholarly work on any author in or out of copyright. Rowling herself has in the past shown great good sense and generosity with her copyright. She gives her blessing to the huge number of fans who write their own Potter stories online for fun, for instance, and has let several for-profit parodies pass unmenaced.
This seems to me an instance where – if Mr Vander Ark is determined not to back down as a courtesy to the woman whose work he professes to admire – she were best to grit her teeth and bear it. “Are we the owners of our own work?” she asks. Once that work has travelled out into the world, I’m afraid the true answer is: not entirely.
