Entry tags:

entitlement, fandom: harry potter, in ur wank - swapping our foodz, internet lawyers, om nom nom, person: jkr, potterdammerung, recipes in comments, this is the wank that never ends, yummeh foodz

And so it begins
I haven't caught it yet, but I'm hearing that the Lexicon case is already on Fox News every half hour. A couple of things I held on to over the weekend:

The latest documents on Justia.

'Potter' author seeks to block fan book. "In court Friday, Hammer said Rowling's lawyers did not want Vander Ark in the courtroom while Rowling testifies."

More later. Watch This Page for update alerts.

ETA: Apparently it's on the Today Show as well (thanks, purplepopple). Also: Harry Potter and the Lawsuit of Doom and Harry Potter and the Fate of Reviews from Galley Cat; Lawsuit By J.K. Rowling & Warner Bros Starts In U.S. Court Monday To Stop Publication Of "Harry Potter Rip-Off"; UPDATE: Sued Publisher Responds at Deadline Hollywood, including wank in the comments (thanks, dorothy1901).

(Re: Justia, nyonyo: "I think I'm a little bit in love with their pie chart and bar graph. It's like 'OH SNAP' being voiced in pie chart form.")

Leaky Lounge: Conspiracy to screw RDR over and publish anyway?

ETA 2: NYT (has photo of Rowling arriving; v. nice suit); CNN.  (I'm going to stop linking to various outlets now, because most of them seem to be copypasting an AP article)

Rowling arrives for Potter case.

Wank in the Mugglenet comments (thanks, mousie. As waltraute says, "Tengoko then does the most amazing thing one ever sees in an internet argument and admits that he was wrong. Wow").

Links via Leaky Lounge: Rowling testifies.

>> Bloomberg.com: " 'Should it be published, I feel that carte blanche will be given to anybody who wants to make a quick bit of money,' Rowling said. 'The idea of my readership parting with their or their parents hard-earned cash for this is a travesty.' " Also: " 'What particularly galls is the lack of quotation marks,' Rowling testified. 'If Mr. Vander Ark had put quotations marks around everything he lifted, most of the lexicon would be in quotation marks.' "

>> Forbes.com: "When Rowling's lawyer asked how she felt about Harry, she replied: 'I really don't want to cry.' But she looked like she was about to do just that."

Also, from MSNBC (thanks, scorpio20): "J.K. Rowling says her efforts to halt a publisher's 'Harry Potter' lexicon have been crushing her creativity. Rowling says she has stopped work on a new novel. She says her federal court case has 'decimated my creative work over the last month'.... She told the court on Monday: 'This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.' "

ETA 3: Via Leaky Lounge: Potter author in NY court in bid to block book.

"Mr. Vander Ark has gutted that book," Rowling, who wrote seven Harry Potter novels, told a New York court. "He has simply taken it and copied it ... It is sloppy, lazy and it takes my work wholesale."

"He's taken my creation ... I did feel an act of betrayal," said Rowling. She said she was not sure if she had "the will or the heart" to now publish her own encyclopedia. She said the possibility that parents would part with their well earned cash to buy Vander Ark's book was "a travesty."

[...]

"The lexicon is not a plausible substitute for any of the Harry Potter novels," said Anthony Falzone, a lawyer for RDR Books. "It's simply not plausible to argue that Ms. Rowling's sales will be hurt in any meaningful way." [...] "It is, above all else, a reference guide," Falzone said. "Profit was never the point."

From cbm: Stanford Attorneys Putting the Smack Down on Harry Potter.

ETA 4: More links: The Huffington Post (from mmlleelizabeth); Le Monde (dreamer_marie); TMZ, with its usual class (Leaky Lounge); ONTD, ditto (anonymouse); the NYT, again, revealing that JKR's never actually testified in court before (hangingfire). Note: There is a certain amount of overlap in many of the articles listed here and above, because many of them are using the AP article as a starting point.

ETA 5: Two links via Leaky Lounge:

1. Wall Street Journal's Law Blog: A bit of levity arrived early: As David Hammer, the lead attorney for RDR, introduced the owner of RDR, Roger Rapoport, he referred to him as the reason “why we’re here today.” But as Dale Cendali, the O’Melveny & Myers attorney representing Warner and Rowling took the podium to begin her opening remarks, she quipped that actually her client, J.K. Rowling, is the reason we’re here today.

Rowling testifies:

“I don’t want to cry, because I’m British,” said Rowling, breaking down a bit, “but the [Harry Potter books] meant setting aside my children.” If that was a show of weakness on Rowling’s part, to the Law Blog’s sensibilities, it was effective in making her seem sympathetic. It was also a counterpoint to testimony that was otherwise declarative and authoritative.

“This trial has decimated my creative work over the last month,” said Rowling. “You lose the [plot] threads and worry whether you’ll be able to pick them up again.”

“Should my fans be flooded with a surfeit of substandard books — so called lexicons — I’m not sure I’d have the will or heart to continue,” said Rowling, who went on to characterize the H.P. Lexicon as “sloppy,” “lazy,” and “incorrect.”

Cendali then took Rowling through a series of comparisons between, on the one hand, Rowling’s novels and her two companion books and, on the other hand, the Lexicon. On a big screen, the plaintiffs positioned passages about “the order of the Phoenix,” “chinese fireballs” and “Florean Fortescue’s ice cream parlor” next to Vander Ark’s entries on those items in the H.P. Lexicon to show that they’d been taken almost verbatim.

“It’s not about money,” concluded Rowling on the stand. “There’s a measure of principle at stake. And I’m determined to have my say as an author.” All in all, in our opinion, a fairly effective direct examination.

2. J. K. Rowling and the Courtroom of Muggles (NYT), probably the most detailed article I've seen yet:

The lead plaintiff lawyer apologized for saying the name of the villain Lord Voldemort out loud. Albus Dumbledore was quoted in opening arguments for his admonition of when you must “choose between what is right and what is easy.”[...]

When asked to discuss the similarity of the Lexicon’s definition of Chinese fireballs on the stand with her own writing, she said that it was not like a giraffe, where if she and Mr. Vander Ark were describing the animal, they might inevitably use the same words. “It’s not as if we are describing something that exists outside my imagination,” she said.

It was clearly an emotional issue for Ms. Rowling, who had flown in from Scotland to testify. She was given a box of blue tissues after she said, “I really don’t want to cry because I’m British.”

[...]

Rather, she said she was opposed to how the “Lexicon” copied many phrases word-for-word from her book without adding meaningful additional context, adding that some of the work was sloppy or wrong. “Alohomora,” a spell that opens doors in Harry Potter’s word, does not come from “aloha,” the Hawaiian salutation, she said on the stand. Rather it derives from a West African term meaning favorable to thieves, she said.

[...]

Occasionally, the muggle world would come in focus. When the lawyer apologized for struggling with the pronunciation of “occamy” (a creature resembling a winged snake that was a play off of Occam’s Razor), Ms. Rowling said: “You can pronounce it any way you want. It is not a real thing.”

(Also: I just want her books to die so we can have GOOD books like Eragon. Best troll ever! Wait... what do you mean, he's for real...?)

Also-also: What's a flint? Answer.

ETA 6: From kuromitsu: JKR's statement regarding court today.

From an anonymouse: More from WSJ's Law Blog:

When J.K. Rowling concluded her testimony today in the case of Warner Bros. and Rowling vs. RDR Books, the Law Blog stepped outside at the recess to have a chat with Columbia copyright professor Tim Wu. “What did you think of Rowling’s testimony,” we asked Professor Wu, who was there with a few students to observe what could be a landmark fair use case. “She was the definition of a star witness,” he said. “It was hard for [the defense] to get anything out of her.”

[...]

But when Hammer tried to get Rowling to concede that the H.P. Lexicon is more comprehensive — in that it’s longer — than other books, she shot back: “Is that the best you can say for the Lexicon? That it has text?” She added, “An alphabetical rearrangement is the easiest and laziest way to re-sell my work.”

Apparently RDR took the stand as well, but I haven't seen any direct quotes of what he said.

Exhibit A: Potterdammerung.

Clearly, JKR is just the front woman for a team of ghostwriters.

JKR ripped off Troll, and also, "The bible, I firmly believe, was an AU fanfiction written about ancient Egyptian mythology."

From nestra: Salon fails. Again.

ETA 7: Melissa at TLC, on Leaky Lounge: "It seems that [the excluded evidence] was part of the wizard cards exhibit; the only hint at what was excluded was some sort of ruling about only including 75 of the cards and not all of them, though the Plaintiffs were allowed to reference them all nonetheless. I didn't really get the distinction. But all the expected charts, graphs and books were there."

Ladies and gentlemen... the Harry Potter Maxicon.

chaimonkey's Pwnage Pie.

We haven't had enough "gossip, he-said she-said, and other unsubstantiated hyperbole," so InsaneJournal is here to save the day.

From fuzzytowers: "More on the 'Troll' thing from blogland in An Open Letter John Buechler, Steve Vander Ark, JK Rowling, and Warner Brothers."

And elsewhere on LJ, courtesy an anonymouse: jkrtrialblog.livejournal.com. "Once Jo was free to step down, questioning began for Roger Rappoport, owner of RDR Books, the publishing company that signed the deal to publish Vander Ark’s Lexicon. This man, simply said, is not made for the hot seat. He continually avoided answering many question and claimed he 'didn’t remember' a majority of the details that were addressed."

ETA 8: Harry Potter and the Presentation of Power(point). "With Warner Bros. involved in this case, I really expected better special effects from their Power Point presentation and believe they missed a great opportunity to wow the judge here." Heh.

More via Leaky Lounge: Publisher's Weekly gives some more details of the testimony.

Throughout cross-examination by Hammer, Rowling’s tone remained pointed. Of her decision to give the Lexicon Web site a “fan award” in 2004, she said that it was more of an “A for effort,” and that it had been a reflection of the amount of time invested in the site—not its quality. Rowling noted that many entries in the Lexicon seemed inadequate and brief; when Hammer responded that the quantity of material might have been a factor in the length of entries, she said, “It’s a lot of work. I remember because I did it.”

Rapoport was cross-examined following Rowling’s testimony (Vander Ark isn’t named in the suit, because the indemnification clause in his contract with RDR holds the publisher, not the author, culpable for any potential copyright issues). When asked why he would agree to be responsible for any possible infringement, Rapoport said, “It was something I felt very comfortable doing.”

By the way, you know how people in movies will turn on the TV and a news report will immediately start on exactly the topic they want to know about? I walked downstairs to where the TV was turned to the local Fox channel, and a report on the trial literally started the moment I entered the room. They added the detail that JKR had asked for a glass of water in addition to being given tissues, and they showed video of the statement she made on the courthouse steps. And... that was pretty much it.

Oh, and that the ruling might take SEVERAL WEEKS.

Latest:

ETA 9: New at Leaky Cauldron: First Day of JKR/WB vs RDR Books Trial, at which Leaky staffer(s?) were in attendance and able to take notes. There are some really interesting points in Rowling's testimony, but I'll only quote from the Rapoport notes since we haven't seen much from his:

Another email to Methuen showed Rapoport saying that JKR said “again and again that [the Lexicon site editors] were her absolute favorite when it comes to a Harry Potter reference book.” The plaintiff’s lawyers said, “You weren’t being honest, were you?” and Rapoport said no. He asked several different ways (“You were making things up, weren’t you?”, and “You put words in Ms. Rowling’s mouth”), and Rapoport said “No.” The lawyer asked if he had one indication that JKR had said any of those things. Rapoport said, “You just showed a quote…There was a very longstanding relationship, awards had been given.” “You were exaggerating to Peter Tummons.” “I don’t think so.” “Where did Ms. Rowling say again and again that the people behind the Lexicon were her favorites?” “She didn’t use those exact words.”

[...]

Regarding the DVD timeline:

RR: “He created an original timeline that ended up on the DVDs.” WB: “You know that Ms. Rowling created the seven original books and then was copied [in the HPL]” RR: “No.” WB: “Is it your testimony that he did not copy from the books.” RR: “No.” WB: “Are you saying that he did?” RR: “No.” WB: “I think that cleared it up, Your Honor.” Judge: “It normally does.”

[...]

The WB lawyer asked if the other three authors of the book would be compensated; Rapoport said he did not have a contract with them but that Steve Vander Ark intended to compensate them. WB asked if any of the many people who have contributed to the Lexicon over the years were in line for compensation. After a few back-and-forths without answers, he said, “If the book is successful, there is a lot of possibility,” Rapoport said. He said the book was “a lot like Wikipedia,” in the way in which the fans have contributed over the years.

The plaintiffs asked if Rapoport had considered that publicity around the case would increase the likelihood of success of the book if they won, and Rapoport said he had never thought about it. Later he said he hadn’t “really” thought about it. “No, I was thinking about whether Ms. Cendali was going to call me up again and scream at me,” he said.

I think I'm going to turn in for the night. Apparently SVA is testifying tomorrow, so we'll start up a fresh entry then.