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

[sistermagpie]

Catlady:
> 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. 

Magpie:
Yes, I know about that case. But I think JKR's lawyers know of it 
too. Steve's publishers have refused to give the book to her lawyers 
to see it, and if there's creativity involved in some of this stuff 
it's possibly about the arrangement etc. of the information. JKR has 
allowed books like this, but they stayed within the parameters they 
were okay with. They're going by it being a publication of the 
lexicon, and they don't think that has enough creativity involved-if 
it were a book of essays that would be okay, but this seems to not be 
that. I understand that if there are essays included, they may not 
all be included with permission of those authors.

Catlady: 
> 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.

Magpie:
I don't think anyone, much less JKR, is claiming that it wasn't work 
to put the information together. But the hard work involved doesn't 
make it a violation or not. If it's just re-organizing her material 
she may have a very good case for saying it actually is crossing the 
line into things she and WB owns. She didn't have a problem with it 
when putting it on the web, but selling it for profit gets into a 
different area.

Fanfic authors put a lot of work into their stories too, but they 
can't publish them for profit.

-m