That case and that book

[nrenka]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, Lee Kaiwen <leekaiwen at ...> wrote:

<snip>

> But in Castle Rock the trivia book failed BOTH the qualitative AND 
> quantitative tests. So even without the fictional facts distinction 
> it is likely the Second District would have found for infringement 
> on quantitative grounds. In short, the distinction does not appear 
> to have been critical even within Castle Rock.

Actually, I think it is.  You can't establish a quantitative analysis
without first deciding what constitutes the infringement--and the
court ruled that the events of the episodes were protected material,
which then meant there was a question of how much of them you could
use, etc.  

> I think in the case of the Lexicon that argument is harder to make. 
> As Carol has admirably demonstrated, the Lexicon DOES add value, in 
> the very least the value of culling, distilling and systematizing 
> facts scatterized throughout the series into a single concise entry. 
> Even absent any scholarly analysis or commentary, *is* a value. A 
> consulter of the lexicon would be spared the hours or days of work 
> necessary to repeat that task, and would likely discover stuff he 
> would otherwise have missed (for example, material culled from JKR 
> interviews).

However, remember that 'sweat of the brow'/work amount does not, per
Feist, make something transformative.  If I don't have any rights to
the material itself (which when it comes to fiction, is a broader
definition of material than with other items), it doesn't matter how
much work or organization I do, unless it renders a product which is
truly distinct from the original, like the discussion of the Andy
Warhol Marilyn Monroe pictures.  Your argument here actually points to
this making it a DERIVATIVE work, which is something explicitly under
the control of the copyright holder.

As for purpose, I read FB for entertainment, but part of that
'entertainment' value is that I learn some details of JKR's world, and
I see what she has added to mythological tropes to make it unique to
her world.  The Lexicon also provides this same purpose--I can read it
to find out about the unique personages and aspects of JKR's fictional
world--and I can get extremely close to the information provided by
the books, precisely because the Lexicon has not added interpretation
or commentary in most cases.  Purpose doesn't have to line up exactly,
as the SAT was a somewhat different kind of entertainment than the
experience of watching an episode of Seinfeld.  Reading through the
Lexicon text online as I have, it's pretty similar to reading FB, or a
compression of the books.