Entry tags:

entitlement, fandom: harry potter, internet lawyers, this is the wank that never ends

On the third day of Wanksmas...
1) Stanford Law group enters fray over Harry Potter guide.

2) So the GVSU talk was last night. From various posters: attendee accounts, plus video.

An amusing note from corellianscribe: "Much to my eternal amusement, he plopped down behind me and asked if I was from journalfen. Translation: was I one of the crazies from Fandom Wank?" But furthermore: SVA came off reasonably well. RDR... not so much.

I brought up the whole point of "Why didn't you just make a PDF file of the lexicon," and cited TheForce.Net's Completely Unofficial Star Wars Encyclopedia, which is available free for download. The idea of a 5,000 page Star Wars encyclopedia made his face light up like he'd just been told Christmas was coming twice this year. After the forum, since he'd asked if he could see it, I actually let him take a look at some of it on my computer. He thought it was one of the coolest things ever, and asked me to send him the link to where he could download it.

He strikes me as the kind of guy I'd like to sit down with and play a hardcore game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. I'm still undefeated, and playing against a walking trivia book would be an exciting challenge. Plus, he's just a nice guy. Legal mess aside (and man, did he pick a crappy publisher to handle this), he's very personable, and not so arrogant that he couldn't peer over my shoulder as I pulled up the encyclopedia and geek out over the existence of such a comprehensive Star Wars reference.

His publisher, on the other hand, really put me off. He was smug, overconfident, and I'm still not sure why. At one point, he even hinted that if JKR won, he'd sue her back for harassment (citing a case in California involving a Tolkien compendium). As Luke Skywalker said to the Emperor, "Your overconfidence is your weakness." I'm not sure he realizes how far over his head all of this is. Were I in his shoes, I'd be playing things a lot smarter, rather than racking legal bills so high that they make Vander Ark wonder if he'll be able to afford to continue running the site (and yes, he mentioned that in the course of the Q&A).

Also, regarding the Star Wars PDF precedent:

Actually my sister asked him that and he was just like, "you can do that?" and then he said he wished he'd thought of it but he had signed a contract. In all honesty he did not strike me as the most tech savvy person. RDR also responded that they had asked the attorneys if that would be suitable and they said no (well of course not at that point). In fact he said if you are fine with web version of the Lexicon then don't buy the book. Steve was the one that said there was no original content in it. I've only met him once and only seen him speak once and I have to go by what I see and he's a nice guy. This was scheduled long before the lawsuit. My guess it was probably scheduled back in August and it was just going to be Steve. [FW note: I can pretty much confirm this.] While I do know that no contract states that you have to show up with your publisher, the feeling that I get from RDR is that they can't help themselves. After the whole thing was over there was a law student who went up and talked law with the attorney they had present.

ETA: RDR Books updates. Again. Key sentence, IMO: "It simply is not the case that authors can exploit copyright law to prevent analysis and commentary on their work."


ETA 2: From aewgliriel: "Someone I know over on Jedi Council Forums [corellianscribe?] is/was involved with the forum on this, and here's what they had to say." Key section: "And, at the end of the talk, a few things became very clear: a) RDR is full of crap and mostly blowing a lot of hot air around. Also, they're not very nice. b) SVA is a nice guy who may or may not ever pull his head out of encyclopedia mode, but he has terrible judgment when it comes to picking publishers. c) 'Cousin Vinny' really doesn't know what he's talking about. At all." Also, she would love to comment here--where's the request-an-account place again?

Speaking of SVA picking publishers, a few things I'm hearing from elanor, take it as you will:

1. RDR first approached SVA about publishing a book, not the other way around. This does seem in keeping with what we've seen of RDR.

2. JKR was not specifically asked if the Lexicon could be published (presumably since other, similar books had been published, including that one we discussed a million billion entries ago that ripped off the Lexicon itself), and therefore did not tell SVA no, as we had heard or had been assuming, whichever. She simply told him earlier that she didn't want any help on her own, and by the time disapproval was expressed on this project because the lawyers heard about it, SVA had already signed a contract with RDR. Whether he should have asked her anyway is a consideration unto itself, I guess.

3. An issue we haven't really noticed: "WB claim[s] to own the Lexicon, as it is work derived from Harry Potter. In the same way, they claim to own *all* fan derived work. They'll tolerate it when it suits them ( i.e. Leaky and Mugglenet, which are nice publicity), but they will also assert their perceived ownership where that suits them, hence the timeline issue. They have never disputed that they copied the calendar from the Lexicon, nor that it was original work. Their claim is simply that it's based on Harry Potter, hence it's theirs to copy and to profit from, and they see no reason that they should have credited the original source. This is taken from the public court documents, which anyone could see for themselves if they could just get over the mob mentality." ETA: Or are they? (Claiming in the court documents, I mean.) I leave it to y'all as to whether the publicly available court documents say this or not; some people are saying they don't.

4. Also, "TLC hosts the Lexicon" may be an outdated statement, and we're in the middle of trying to verify this. So, before people get caught up in accusations of donation scams, there may be more to the situation than just the blanket TLC statement of hosting, and my understanding is that this may have recently changed. Again, I don't know; this is sort of an in-progress kind of thing. ETA: The TLC hosting statement has in fact changed.

Also, I think I made another error in judgment. I posted those four points without immediately mentioning their source. Because I've run off too far in the anti-SVA direction before, I think I was trying to overcompensate in the other direction, and in this case may have done y'all a disservice in not noting a biased source. Thank you to those posters who reminded me of this.

ETA 3: Via fortheloveof22: TLC's Melissa's version of the Lexicon hosting situation.