Remember that book about Harry Potter that JK Rowling didn’t write that made JK Rowling so furious that she almost pooed her spine out in court?
You do? Well in that case you’ll be pleased to know that JK Rowling has won her court case. A judge in New York has claimed that Steven Jan Vander Ark‘s The Harry Potter Lexicon does illegally plagiarise the Harry Potter novels and so it can never be released.
What does this mean? In short it means that if Harry Potter fans want to buy a secondary book that acts as a reference guide for the myriad Harry Potter characters, locations and themes, they can now either a) wait for JK Rowling to finish writing her Harry Potter encyclopedia or b) grow up and stop being such moon-faced, sappy-eyed farty arseholes with their gormless wizard fixations and their stupid bloody haircuts.
JK Rowling didn’t get where she is today by letting people walk all over her, you know. No, JK Rowling got where she is today by writing seven books about a speccy wizard fighting Darth Vader with his pet owl. And there’s nobody who can take that away from her.
Not even Steven Jan Vander Ark, author of The Harry Potter Lexicon – a digest of the Harry Potter characters and mythology that infuriated JK Rowling almost to the point of bloodclots when she caught wind of it earlier this year.
In the end JK Rowling took the Lexicon to court to try and halt its release, claiming that as the author of the original Harry Potter books it was her right to kick every last drop of cash possible from the series and nobody else’s.
And she put up a mighty fight in court too, doing just about everything short of turning up to testify in a fake bushy beard and biblical robes and ordering the sky to destroy The Harry Potter Lexicon with lightning.
She claimed, for example, that the Lexicon was theft and that it preyed on the vulnerability of overexcited Harry Potter fans by offering them a tawdry knock-off experience based on a character they love. Incidentally, the Wizarding World Of Harry Potter theme park opens in 2010. Book your tickets now, kids.
And it seemed to work because, five months after the trial ended, the judge has finally reached his ruling, and it’s good new for JK Rowling. The New York Times reports:
“Plaintiffs have shown that the lexicon copies a sufficient quantity of the Harry Potter series to support a finding of substantial similarity between the Lexicon and Rowling’s novels,” Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote in his 68-page ruling… “I took no pleasure at all in bringing legal action and am delighted that this issue has been resolved favorably,” Ms. Rowling said in a statement.
As well as stopping The Harry Potter Lexicon from being published, JK Rowling also received financial damages in the ruling, too – $6,750, to be precise. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but JK Rowling is still grateful nonetheless. She might get three, perhaps even four bumwipes out of that cash.
And what of Steven Jan Vander Ark, the Harry potter fan who spent seven years compiling The Harry Potter Lexicon? What will he do now that his work has been blocked? Hopefully he’ll buy himself a mirror, because that’s probably the only way that he’ll realise he’s a 50-year-old man who likes Harry Potter and has therefore completely wasted his entire life.
Stabby McGee says
Ooh, sick burn.