JK Rowling knows everything there is to know about Harry Potter – her brain is literally a soggy, pulsating Harry Potter encyclopedia.
And JK Rowling wants to pass on her unbeatable knowledge of Harry Potter to the fans by cutting the top of her skull off, smooshing her brain into a billion tiny globs and selling them on to Harry Potter fans for a million pounds each. Or she wants to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia and sell that instead. We forget which.
Anyway, a new third party Harry Potter encyclopedia that’s coming out soon has got JK Rowling worried – not only will it scupper sales of the official JK Rowling-written encyclopedia, but it’ll also be an inferior product. Anyway, JK Rowling’s great big lawsuit has begun. And it’s either really exciting or quite dull. We forget which.
It’s impossible to overstate how much Harry Potter means to JK Rowling. She dreams of Harry Potter, she’s had scuffles with airport officials over Harry Potter manuscripts and, um, something else. What could it be?
Oh yes, Harry Potter has made JK Rowling so extraordinarily rich that she barely even qualifies as human any more. If JK Rowling wanted, she could buy small Micronesian islands and sink them with explosives just for fun – and she still wouldn’t notice a difference in her bank balance. The Harry Potter books, Harry Potter movies, Harry Potter merchandise and Harry Potter theme park all help JK Rowling get richer.
But if you try and make money from Harry Potter without JK Rowling’s say-so, then don’t be surprised if she gets all Jeremy Clarkson on you. That’s the case with The Harry Potter Lexicon, at least – a forthcoming Harry Potter reference book that JK Rowling wants banned because she didn’t write it.
Back in February JK Rowling threatened The Harry Potter Lexicon with a lawsuit, and now the thing’s jolly well started, as The Press Association reports
If the publisher wins, Rowling said she will “find it devastating to contemplate the possibility of such a severe alteration of author-fan relations… it will undoubtedly have a significant, negative impact on the freedoms enjoyed by genuine fans on the internet. Authors everywhere will be forced to protect their creations much more rigorously, which could mean denying well-meaning fans permission to pursue legitimate creative activities.”
It all seems a little bit overcautious to us – after all, reference books exist for every significant author from Shakespeare to Chaucer, and you never hear either of those getting their knickers in a twist about it. Imagine if they had – we wouldn’t have had anything to copy our GSCE exam essay from verbatim. Nightmare.
On the other hand, though, perhaps JK Rowling does have a point – authors will be less willing to closely interact with their fans if they suspect that everything they say will be cobbled together into an opportunistic book and sold without their permission. In fact, JK Rowling says that her relationship with fans will deteriorate so badly if she loses this lawsuit that she’ll hide landmines in every fifth copy of her own Harry Potter encyclopedia just in case.
But, however this lawsuit goes, at least it’ll keep JK Rowling busy. And anything that stops her flashing her bra at children is just dandy with us.
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Snitch says
Gee all that money has turned her into a real scrounging moaning luvvie.
Gilbert Wham says
She’ll be absolutely fucked. There is a massive industry of third-party reference works. Entire academic careers are based on this for fuck’s sake.
The fact that this is a reference book for a crap children’s story made from bits ganked from the work of every successful children’s authour of the past hundred years matters not one iota. The judge will hopefully explain this to her.
She’s going to piss off the publishing world mightily. Not a good idea for a writer.
mst3kster says
I think she’s howling mad at herself, and now at the world, because she recently realized that she could have made billions more if the main character had been a gay pornstar with magical powers, named Harry Peter.