that lawsuit / concordances / copyright

Sat Apr 19 21:20:47 UTC 2008

Steve/bboyminn wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35973>:

<< I think it is heart breaking that two people who up until this
point has a very cordial relationship, are now at each other's throat
using teams of lawyers as weapons. Very sad indeed. >>

Hear, hear!

It was MY wish that Herself would hire Lexicon Steve as an assistant
in writing Her encyclopedia. 

Damn.

(As I read onward, I see that other listies had similar wishes. Your
idea of a large book combining the updated Lexicon entries with
Rowling's newspaper articles, textbook entries, personal letters,
diaries, excerpts from HOGWARTS, A HISTORY, etc is my dream desire.)

Dumbledad wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35989>:

<< if that's anything to go by he is/was the biggest squeeing fan-boy
in the world. The impression I got was that if JKR had asked him to
sacrifice his first-born he'd have thought about it. So how it got to
the point where it went to court is beyond me. >>

Hear, hear!

Lee Truslow wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35978>:
<< Jo testifies
<http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/04/14/rowling.trial.ap/index.html>
>>

Magpie wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35980>:
<< Getting more dramatic:
<http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-harrypotter-lawsuit.html?ex=1208836800&en=7d1d6a3225ecff1c&ei=5070&emc=eta1>
>>

The NY Times article is where <<She has called Vander Ark's book
"sloppy, lazy" work >> and << "The lexicon is filled with errors." >> 

That *really* irritated me when I heard it on the news. 

The Lexicon is very accurate, and she has publicly stated so herself:
as the CNN article mentioned: << Rowling mentioned his Web site on her
own, writing, "This is such a great site that I have been known to
sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather
than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is
embarrassing). A Web site for the dangerously obsessive; my natural
home." >> 

So now she is contradicting herself.

More NYT article: << U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson urged the
sides to settle, saying the case reflected an emerging part of
copyright law with no clear precedents. >>

Hear, hear!

Alla wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35985>:

<< I know, maybe I should put the characters in order of alphabet and
summarise what all families in [WAR AND PEACE] are about?

You think had Lev Tolstoy had he been alive would have been happy
with me? Personally I really doubt that and I think that would have
been stealing of his work and making money out of it. My opinion of
course. >>

People write guidebooks to minerals, sometimes to minerals found in
the wild in a region, with photographs of the rocks in their natural
state and after having been cut and polished, as well as information
on the chemistry, geology, and human use of these minerals. People
write identification guides to the trees or plants or birds or animals
of a region, with photographs or drawings as well as verbal
descriptions. Are these writers 'stealing of' Nature 'and making money
out of it'?

I don't know if anyone has written a guidebook to the characters in
the Iliad, but if someone did, were they stealing from Homer to make
money?

Dumbledad's example of Cruden's Bible Concordance is better than
either of my examples.

Alla replied to Dumbledad in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/35996>:

<< But this is Bible. Who will be copyright holder in this instance? I
mean I know you said non-copyright example, but to me it is the key,
there is no living person to do so, no?  >>

I saw your argument that you meant only if Tolstoy were still alive
and had kept his copyright. I grudgingly suppose that you, as a
lawyer, can define 'stealing' only as taking something from someone
who has a legal right to it, as in the old case of a record company
that sued one of its under-contract bands for violating a copyright
owned by the record company by performing their own original songs in
concert. I can't agree with that definition, as I define stealing as
taking something from someone who has a *moral* right to it. 

I even grant that it can make lots of sense to say that the someone's
 moral right to the something ended with the someone's death. I don't
think I would feel much sympathy for a ghost or zombie who came back
from death demanding 'Give me back my rent-controlled apartment!' 

Were you thinking that the writer's moral right to control how hiser
output is used ends at hiser death? That didn't occur to me until I
was writing this reply, because one of my very good friends more than
once buried me under a blizzard of quotes from Mark Twain and Rudyard
Kipling stating that the author's copyright should be eternal.

If the term limit of copyright was eternal, we not only wouldn't have
teen comedy movies that are based on Shakespeare's plays, we wouldn't
have most of Shakespeare's plays, because he stole his plots from all
over, from Saxo Grammaticus and Girardus Cambrensis and Plutarch's
LIVES. Tbe culture would be poorer without Shakespeare's plays, and
poorer without ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDERSTERN ARE DEAD. We wouldn't have
The Iliad and all its retellings, because Homer strung together (and
probably modified) tales that were already being told.

Copyright freezes culture. On the other hand, I agree with my friend
that artistic creators deserve some reward for their work and ability,
and in our culture the only meaningful reward is money. Limiting
copyright to x number of years is a compromise between these two
things. But Congress keeps making it longer and longer, because they
are bribed by Walt Disney Company, which can't endure to lose the
ownership of Mickey Mouse. It would be much better for the culture if
Congress passed a law that the copyrights of works and characters
created by Walt Disney and his employees in his lifetime were eternal,
and the term limit of other copyrights would be dealt with separately.

By the way, I get furious with the argument that writers wouldn't
bother to write unless they could count on making money from it.
Before copyright, writers were so eager for their work to be read that
they even put it under the name of more famous writers, such as Aristotle.