My Weekly Book

Here’s an opinion piece from The Telegraph on the JK Rowling vs Steve Vander Ark copyright case that I found reasonably sane and intelligent (apart from the cheap jibes about Dan Brown, which are simply immature and stupid and weaken the piece generally). It neatly sums up how easily the most worrying thing for me and a lot of other people are the implications that a judgement in Rowling’s favour would have for the wider world of publishing and the intellectual arena:

JK Rowling’s latest: Harry Potter and the Lexicographer’s Tome

The category into which the row over the Harry Potter Lexicon falls is a special one, but it has huge implications. What its author is doing – in compiling a reference guide to someone else’s original work – is, whatever its motive or quality, more or less identical in kind to what literary academics do for a living.

At one end of the scale you have The Pound Era or Mimesis; at the other, the York Notes. And these books don’t just cover olden-day works. My old teacher, John Fuller, was able to publish a hugely helpful guide to the works of WH Auden, for instance, despite the fact that his work remains in copyright.

Some of these sorts of books are presented essayistically; others more or less lexically or encyclopedically. An invaluable tool for scholars is the concordance, something that, before computers, was a colossal and astonishingly boring labour to compile. Essentially, it lists all the words in a writer’s work in alphabetical order, and tells you where each one can be found in the original text.

[snip]

…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.
Read full piece here…

Rowling seems to be facing something of a backlash now – a phenomenon Vander Ark has already had in spades. Many, many recent blog entries have been written on the derivative nature of her own work – and mentioning pots, kettles, glass houses and stones. Several of these mention Tolkein (and by Half-Blood Prince it was getting frankly embarrassing).

One comment piece calls Harry Potter the most derivative series ever devised. Here’s a selection of others.

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