Where's the Grey? (was: That case and that book)

[Lee Kaiwen]

This weekend, on a visit to a bookstore (a rare treat, as there are very 
few well-stocked English bookstores in Taiwan), I perused a number of 
guides, encyclopedias and concordances, including the following:

Paul Ford, Companion to Narnia
Christin Ditchfield, A Family Guide to Narnia
David Day, The Illustrated Tolkien Encyclopedia
David Day, The Tolkien Bestiary
Michael Drout, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical 
Assessment
Michael Perry, Untangling Tolkien
George Beahm, The Essential Tolkien Sourcebook: A Fan's Guide
Lois Gresh (herself an SF and fantasy author), The Fan's Guide to The 
Spiderwick Chronicles (specifically bills itself as "unauthorized").
Also by Lois Gresh, The Ultimate Unauthorized Eragon Guide
A guide to Larry Niven's Ringworld, the details of which I forgot to jot 
down.

And two from my own collection:

J. E. A. Tyler, The New [not any more] Tolkien Companion
Robert Foster, The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth

And specifically HP-related:

Kristina Benson, The Unofficial Harry Potter Encyclopedia
Colin Duriez, The Unauthorised Harry Potter Companion
David Colbert, The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter
Aubrey Malone, An A-Z of Harry Potter

And of course never far from mind is the unparalleled Encyclopedia of 
Arda, the amazing online Tolkien encyclopedia (also available for sale 
on CD-ROM) that is what Steve Vander Ark's site could only dream of being.

I don't know about the authorized status of anything I looked at (except 
those specifically calling themselves unauthorized), and I know both the 
Tolkien and the Lewis estates are pretty aggressive at protecting their 
intellectual property.

But after perusing the Justitia document Alla linked to, I'm left 
scratching my head and wondering where the alleged grey area is in 
regard to the RDR/SVA guide. My own eye can't find any relevant 
distinction from any of the guides I browsed through. And Steve's work 
appears to contain fewer verbatim citations than either Foster's Guide 
to Middle-Earth (though I'm pretty sure believe that is specifically an 
authorized work) or the Encyclopedia of Arda. Fewer, in fact, from what 
I could tell, than Benson's "unofficial" HP encyclopedia.

Can anyone enlighten me on what's so grey about this case? And why JKR 
doesn't seem much bothered by any of the other unauthorized HP guides?

CJ