Beedle the Bard; Lexicon

[Annemehr]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, ewe2 <ewetoo at ...> wrote:

> They're entitled to ignore such c&d's under fair use. And there are
> other arguments cf. below.
> <snip>
> I don't see much difference between books that talk about the HP
> series (which have had no barrier to publication) and books that are
> essentially lists of canon which is essentially what the Lexicon is.
> The only problem I can see here is that the Lexicon might actually
> compete with JKR enterprises who didn't think of it first. If you can
> draw correlations between HP and myth and publish it, then the Lexicon
> publishers have a stab at a prior art defence, or at least that's how
> my tiny brain sees it.
> 

Nah, it could be way different.  Fair use allows you to quote smallish 
amounts of stuff (those are technical law terms) in order to talk 
*about* it.  But IF the RDR book is to reproduce the information in the 
Lexicon in printed form, it would in huge part be a repackaging for 
sale of vast amounts of copyrighted material, potentially including 
text and illustrations taken from HP books, playing and trading cards, 
games, movies, and JKR's Lightmaker site.  (And the BBC article that 
Dave linked to calls it "a book version of a popular website dedicated 
to the boy wizard," though I don't know how they know that.)

Of course, nobody knows for sure what the book is planned to contain, 
because RDR won't show anyone.  So JKR's people and WB have no choice 
but to press ahead with their suit to keep their rights protected, 
right?

Anne