Lexicon book (was: One reporter reacts to JKR's revelations

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

In my not-so-humble opinion, lately a lot of replies don't snip away
enough of the message that they're replying to something in.

Magpie wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/33965>:

<< I'm with JKR on [(the suit against the Lexicon book]. The book
takes her work and repackages it and tries to profit off of it. It
crossed a line she'd made clear. >>

I recall hearing of a case several years ago in which someone took a
local telephone book and republished it with a new title and fancy
cover to sell for profit. And the phone company which had issued that
book sued to stop him. And the court (IIRC it reached the Supreme
Court) ruled that the phone book is not protected by copyright or
intellectual property because, as a mere list of facts, it was not
'creative'. And I felt morally outraged at that decision, because
'merely' gathering a lot of facts and listing them in an organized way
(alphabertical order) is A Lot of Work, and I think it's immoral for
someone to steal someone else's hard work. 

Sometimes people get Ph.Ds for the hard (and valuable) work of reading
the literature to find all the words that one scholar or another has
suceeded in translating from a lost language and listing all these
words in one document. Translating the word is hard work that is given
credit by a citation. Assembling all the words is hard work that is
given credit in future citations. 

Okay, nowdays it's not so much work for a phone company to dump data
from computer files onto paper, but it was work inputting all that
into the computer, and I still think it's immoral for that guy to
republish it without putting on the cover that it is a reprint of
thus-and-such phone book.

And the relevance of this to a Lexicon book (I haven't read any of the
articles on Leaky) is that even if the law says such a book belongs to
JKR not to the Lexicon website owner(s), we fans should not ignore
that assembling in an organized way all the information created by JKR 
is a lot of work that was not done by JKR.