The Adventures Of Willy The Wizard No 1: Livid Land is a wonderful book wherein the protagonist possibly vanquishes evil by rubbing it incessantly with his magical buttock.

Since Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire basically has the exact same plot, sentence structure, verb-to-noun ratio and pie graphs, the heirs of the Willy Wizard estate have recognised it as unapologetic plagiarism. As such they are now suing JK Rowling either until she agrees to show them the exact location of Hogwarts, and to allow Willy Wizard a full seven-book scholarship there, or for 813 million dollars.

We honestly don’t remember which.

When JK Rowling first decided to write Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire for the sole purpose of furthering her unholy satanic agenda, she probably had no idea why her dark lord, as he spoke from the belly of a freshly slain cat, demanded she do so by plagiarising a boring author that nobody ever heard of and would likely never read.

But that’s just what she did. Allegedly. Well of course you know she probably didn’t do it, but that’s what two descendants of Adrian Jacobs are claiming. They are bound and determined to squeeze Rowling for £500 million in a British court of law. Either that or they’re bound and determined to get their dead dad a butt-load of publicity with a lawsuit like this.

Here’s what it says on All Headline News:

“Legal papers filed by Jacobs’ estate list similarities between the books, including “shared references” to a wizard train and prison and a magical contest where the boy wizard must rescue human hostages taken captive by half-human creatures. In addition to £500 million [$813 million] in damages, the estate is seeking an injunction to prevent further sales of the offending book, or a share in the tome’s profits”

If that’s not enough for you – here’s what a Willy Wizard fan wrote about the book on Amazon.co.uk:

“This book is great for kids, it very much appears to resemble Harry Potter. I love this book, ive grown up with it and it has been signed by the author Adrian Jacobs. i really do recommend this book to every child. it is very hard to get a hold of and is extremely rare. Its about Willy the Wizard who goes to wizard college on a train and adventures begin to happen, you will really have to read this book yourself its great!!”

If this lawsuit works and the Willy Wizard people end up with part-ownership in all of Rowling’s bank accounts, let us simply state we once wrote a book called ‘The Wizard’s Willy.’ It was about a magician who died but most of his genitalia lived on for another 100 years helping those in need. We haven’t actually read Willy Wizard, but the title alone definitely borrows heavily from our little-read masterpiece.

We’re just saying that we’re probably owed a little something too. British courts – save us a seat.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Because if that was true, then JK Rowling would be our dealer. And Rowling is a mean dealer, too – she’s been withholding our supply, probably until we break down and agree to let her become our pimp or something – but yesterday JK Rowling threw us a lifeline.

Because yesterday JK Rowling released her new book The Tales Of Beedle The Bard – kind of like the methadone to Harry Potter’s hardcore skag – and somewhat predictably it instantly became a bestseller.

Never let it be said that JK Rowling isn’t an intelligent woman. She knows as well as anyone else that nothing she ever does for the rest of her life will be as popular as Harry Potter and that, once the Harry Potter series had ended, there was a strong chance that she’d be on the scrapheap. A really nice scrapheap, obviously, made of great big gold scraps that your entire family couldn’t afford even if they worked every hour of the day for their entire lives, but a scrapheap nonetheless.

So what did JK Rowling do? She made sure that an important plot device in the last Harry Potter book was The Tales Of Beedle The Bard – a gimmicky spin-off book that she could then write herself and flog off to the millions of children who’d buy a rancid squirrel carcass if it was branded with the Harry Potter logo. Genius.

It’s important to note that JK Rowling didn’t publish The Tales Of Beedle The Bard for the money – all proceeds from it are going to charity – but for the supercharged thrill of knowing that if she was any more powerful she’d legally qualify as a god and that she can crush her enemies like bugs whenever she wants. And, you know, because she likes writing and children and charity and crap.

Anyway, JK Rowling released The Tales Of Beedle The Bard yesterday and, as if you needed telling, it was instantly snapped up by everyone hungry to get their hands on a fresh slice of authentic Harry Potter literature, even if none of them would know what a bloody Beedle was if it came up and shat in their mouths. The New York Daily News reports:

J.K. Rowlings new book “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” hit stores Thursday, and it looks like Harry Potter fans can’t get a copy fast enough! The book soared to the top of the online bestsellers lists on Amazon.com and the Barnes&Noble Web site. A $100 collector’s edition offered exlusively on Amazon.com had skyrocketed from 778,576 to 22 on the site’s ”Movers & Shaker’s” list, which tracks the biggest gainers in sales rank.

Now, look, we know it’s for charity and everything, but know this – if you see anyone reading the $100 version of The Tales Of Beedle The Bard in public, it’s your moral and legal obligation to knock the book out of their hands and into a puddle to make them cry. Just so you know.

Anyway, now that The Tales Of Beedle The Bard is officially a hit, all we need to do is sit back and wait for the inevitable movie adaptation to hit cinemas, something which we’re particularly looking forward to because – if the Harry Potter actor tradition holds – it won’t be long before Babbitty Rabbitty gets her cackling stump out onstage during a theatrical production of Equus.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

And that’s because now everyone’s reading Twilight instead, despite the fact that reading a staunchly conservative abstinence manifesto dressed up as a slushy emo romance fantasy in front of other adults is far worse than reading Harry Potter.

So hooray for JK Rowling, who tomorrow releases her new Harry Potter spin-off book The Tales of Beedle the Bard, either for charity or to help us identify idiots more easily on the tube. Merry Christmas to you too, JK!

We thought that JK Rowling had been living in idle luxury since the publication of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows last year, maybe ordering 50 pizzas at once and then crapping all over them, or maybe giving the homeless urine-covered five-pound notes to take off their trousers and sing I’m A Little Teapot as loudly as possible. We’d expect JK Rowling does that because it’s exactly what we’d do if we earnt £13,000 an hour, too.

But we were wrong. Just because she’s so rich that she could tile her swimming pool with orphan teeth if she wanted, JK Rowling has found endless things to do with her time – like suing people who admire her and talking down to people more intelligent than her. And she’s also managed to make a clean break and move on from her Harry Potter days, too.

Well, OK, not a clean break, exactly. Or any other kind of break, for that matter. In fact, JK Rowling has pretty much carried on writing about Harry Potter regardless, like a woman who hasn’t stopped packing her husband’s lunchbox every morning even though he died a year ago.

The Tales Of Beedle The Bard might be familiar to some Harry Potter fans because not only was it alluded to in the Harry Potter novels, but it’s also the book that JK Rowling handwrote and auctioned off for almost £2 million last year. And now, in a peculiarly millionaire-spiting move, JK Rowling will tomorrow widely publish a printed, easier-to-read version of The Tales Of Beedle The Bard at a generously pikey-friendly price. Reuters reports:

A new book by British author J.K. Rowling, her unofficial farewell to the adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter which made her the world’s wealthiest writer, goes on sale on Thursday. Proceeds from “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” expected to become an international bestseller even though the seven-book Potter series is over, will go to a charity for vulnerable children in Eastern Europe co-founded by Rowling.

Now, we haven’t researched this properly, but the charity that proceeds of The Tale Of Beedle The Bard will go to is either The Children’s High Level Group which campaigns to protect and promote children’s rights across Europe, or The Stitch This Harry Potter Merchandise Faster And I Might Give You Some Of My Food Foundation, which we’ve just made up. But it’s definitely one of those two.

But if you don’t want to The Tales Of Beedle The Bard, then don’t worry. Knowing what a cash cow Harry Potter is, it’s only a matter of time before someone at Warner Bros adapts it into a movie. And that way, rather than helping some whiny European kids, you’ll be lining the pockets of an obnoxious power-crazed nonspecific Hollywood executive who we imagine cheats on his wife with a teenager and spends his weekend throwing pebbles at dogs.

Which is better, obviously.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

And you know that poo you did this morning? The one you bit off prematurely because you were in a rush? JK Rowling earnt enough money to buy two Playstations and a week in a Greek villa during that. It’s just been announced, you see, that JK Rowling is the richest author on the planet, earning £5 a second.

So even just then, when you recoiled in disgust at our graphic description of chopping a poo in half with your sphincter, JK Rowling probably made enough money to go on a three-hour shopping spree at Primark. A shopping spree that ironically would earn JK Rowling enough money to but a nice eight-berth yacht that, if she took on a two-week cruise, would earn her enough money to buy your entire family forever, basically.

JK Rowling is very fond of telling the story about how she wrote the first Harry Potter book in a Scottish cafe before going home to a damp-filled flat that she had to sleep standing up in because it wasn’t big enough for a bed. But now, if she wanted, JK Rowling could easily buy that cafe. And that flat.

In fact, if JK Rowling really felt like it, she could probably pay to have Scotland chainsawed off and scuttled out of nothing more than petty spite. Because JK Rowling is rich.

That’s probably not such a surprise, what with JK Rowling writing the most popular series of children’s books of all time which then went on to create some of the most successful movies of all time and some of the most oppressively ubiquitous spin-off merchandise of all time. But, really, JK Rowling is rich.

JK Rowling is so rich that in an hour she earns as much as a call centre worker does in a year. In a day she earns what a Premiership footballer does in a week. And in a week, JK Rowling earns enough to bulldoze everything on the planet and write a message across the Earth challenging the Sun to a fight. BBC News reports:

JK Rowling is the world’s highest-earning author, making more than £5 every second over the past year, US business magazine Forbes has announced. The Harry Potter writer, who made a total of $300m (£170m) last year, wrote the first of her best-selling books about the boy wizard in 1997. Her income was six times more than literature’s next-biggest earner, James Patterson, of Along Came A Spider fame.

That’s an incredible amount of money – so huge that JK Rowling must barely be able to comprehend it herself. She could go to a pub, drink 20 pints of beer in a minute and still come out having made quite a substantial profit.

Of course, there’s no doubting that JK Rowling earnt her money and, in a year that saw the release of the final Harry Potter book and a Harry Potter movie, we’re probably seeing JK Rowling at the peak of her earning potential at the moment.

It’s probably for the best that JK Rowling stopped writing Harry Potter books when she did, though, because ultimately her lifestyle would eventually begin to bleed into her creations. And Harry Potter And The Day Spent Throwing Faberge Eggs Off A Shopping Centre Car Park For The Amusement Of People He’d Bought As His Slaves doesn’t exactly have best-seller written all over it.

Death! Fear! Famine! Terror! Bono! Knives! Guns! They all make for happy and pleasant reading on the way in to work. All before you’re charged £1.80 for a piss weak cup of coffee in the local café.

If the thought of being stabbed to death isn’t great enough to reduce you to a nervous wreck who only watches Jeremy Kyle, we’ve got a new crisis. Apparently, all the banks in the world who rape us via bank charges have run out of money or something. Subsequently, everything is going to cost more and limit us to only seven Starbucks trips a day. With Gordon Brown taking the hit for messing up the country, there seems to have been no help or even a cuddle anywhere. Well that is until JK Rowling came along and donated £1,000,000 of her own money to help him out.

With a personal fortune of £560m stashed away under the mattress, JK Rowling has to do something with all that money. Not only has the Harry Potter brand enabled her to always pay her bill without checking, it’s also help spawn the careers of other people associated with the ever-growing franchise.

Daniel Radcliffe was cast as the spectacle-wearing nerd in the film adaptations. As he grew up, got more attractive to ladyfolk and hit puberty he shifted gears in to other acting ventures. While whipping your cock out and dancing around with horses sounds like some sort of specialist pornography, it was all apparently tastefully done in some sort of play. Next they’ll be saying that selling a zebra in a box constitutes art.

But not everything to do with Harry Potter is fluffy and cute. Steven Vander Ark decided to make an encyclopaedia of everything to do with Harry Potter. From detailing every character to listing magic potions and exam cheats, it was every geek’s wet dream. A whole Bible of knowledge about something that isn’t real. Sadly, JK Rowling decided that she didn’t want this to happen. Reigning down the blows like lightning bolts, she banned the release and made a few people cry. She plans to release her own version one day. Probably when she runs out of people to sue for vague reasons.

Because she hasn’t been in the news for a while, JK Rowling has decided to publicly give the Labour Party a cool £1,000,000 because their policies to look after children are apparently the best and make her happy and jumpy. Hooray! She loves the children, and told BBC News:

“I believe that poor and vulnerable families will fare much better under the Labour Party than they would under a Cameron-led Conservative Party. Gordon Brown has consistently prioritised and introduced measures that will save as many children as possible from a life lacking in opportunity or choice.”

Did you manage to digest all that? Nope neither could we. For a woman who could buy us bacon rolls everyday for eternity, it strikes us as slightly odd that she’s complaining about how poor we are and how that miserable Scottish bastard of a Prime Minister can solve it. Send us all a cheque for £10, that’ll do just fine. Granted, it may be abused down a pub or casino but free stuff is always welcome.

But are Gordon Brown and JK Rowling actually working on something else? Are all state school being planned to be turned in to magic academies? Will pupils be turned into an army of wizards who’ll be trained to kill via a quick flick of a magic wand? We don’t know, but it could spark off a worldwide surge of book/TV tie in schools. America will launch the A-Team academy and Germany will pledge to have all its citizens fully fledged in the art of how to kill a person with a sausage.

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.

This makes JK Rowling the most uniquely qualified person on the face of the earth to speak at Harvard University’s spring commencement yesterday. For only JK Rowling can fill those students’ young hearts with the hope that they too can one day rip off the Narnia books and make a sodding fortune out of it.

In her spring commencement speech, JK Rowling told the Harvard students not to fear failure, that they should never let go of their imagination and that real strength of character comes through adversity – proof that if her money ever runs out, JK Rowling has a lucrative future writing inserts for those horrible aspirational greetings cards that only creepy friendless wimps buy.

You know what the most insufferable invention of all time is? Spring commencement, that’s what. A ghastly self-congratulatory aren’t-we-great parade of ‘cherish the moment and be all you can be’ oversincerity that people apparently manage to sit through without vomiting, spring commencement is essentially the last shove that university students get before they forge long-lasting careers for themselves as the sad-eyed people who stand in town holding signs for Subway sandwiches in the rain. It’s dreadful.

But it’s not entirely worthless, because occasionally famous people get to dust off their Big Book Of Mawkish Catch-All Sentiments and indirectly explain exactly how rich and successful they are to the outgoing students. This year at Harvard, it was Harry Potter creator JK Rowling’s turn to do exactly that.

And JK Rowling really had her work cut out for her, because she knew only too well that the sheer scale of deprivation among Harvard students has rendered them completely hopeless – several of them won’t be given flashy-sounding but meaningless vice president jobs in their fathers’ corporations for up to 18 months, and it breaks our heart to report that a handful of them don’t even own yachts yet.

So yesterday in her spring commencement speech, JK Rowling dug deep and basically went through the lyrics of The Greatest Love Of All, changing all the words with a thesaurus to make it sound cleverer. The Associated Press reports:

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” she said. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better.” Imagination gives one the ability to empathize with others, she said. “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation,” Rowling said. “In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity; it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

“But don’t your imagination to write children’s book about wizards,” JK Rowling added, “because that’s my turf and I’ll sue your bollocks off if any of you little fuckers try it.”

Honestly, those Harvard students get it all handed to them on a plate. In the space of one year they’ve had talks by both Paris Hilton and JK Rowling – and the knowledge gained by those two speakers means that they’re now perfectly primed to grow up and become the next generation of global leaders.

Well, that or they’ll suck a bunch of men off and then make a rubbish-sounding theme park about it. One or the other.

Not content with the book of Harry Potter fairy tales she recently wrote, or the Harry Potter encyclopedia she’s working on now, JK Rowling has found the time to write a prequel to the Harry Potter books, set before Harry first went to Hogwarts.

However, there’s only one copy of this 800-word Harry Potter prequel and it’s going to be auctioned for charity, so hardly anyone will be able to read it. But the rest of you shouldn’t worry – give it a year and Warner Bros will have bought the rights and padded it out into a brand new nine-hour movie trilogy. In space.

As any novelist and most parents will tell you, it’s difficult to kill off your own creation. That definitely seems to be the case with Harry Potter and JK Rowling. JK Rowling finished writing Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows a couple of years ago, but she just can’t seem to let go of the boy wizard.

Maybe that’s because Harry Potter has been JK Rowling’s closest companion for a decade. Maybe it’s because Harry Potter left a mark on society more indelible than anything else JK Rowling will ever write. Or maybe it’s because Harry Potter made JK Rowling so rich that all the jewelery she now owns is made from the crystallised remains of Jesus Christ. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, JK Rowling seems unable to stop sneaking out new Harry Potter morsels every couple of months. First it was the handwritten Harry Potter fairy tales that were given to friends and auctioned off. Then there’s the Harry Potter encyclopedia that’s definitely JK Rowling’s idea and she’ll sue you if you copy her. And now there’s a brand-new Harry Potter prequel.

Don’t get too excited, though – the Harry Potter prequel is only 800 words long and written on both sides of an A5 storycard, which means you’ll look like even more of a dick than usual if you try reading it on the tube. Also there’s only one copy and it’s probably going to cost about £5 million when it’s sold in a charity auction next month. Sky News reports:

Rowling has penned a prequel to the bestselling seven-book series describing what happened to Harry before he went to Hogwarts. The new piece is one of 13 story outlines written by famous writers for a charity auction to be held by Waterstones on June 10…. [Rowling] says at the end of the story, written on both sides of an A5 storycard: “From the prequel I am not working on – but that was fun!”

We’re not entirely sure what happens in this new Harry Potter prequel but, since Star Wars was such an obvious influence on the Harry Potter books, we believe that it’ll centre around a complex and obscure trade disagreement, show Lord Voldemort as the adorable little boy from Jingle All The Way and feature a stupid racially-dubious alien that everyone hates because he’s obviously just there to sell merchandising.

Still, it’s wrong of us to criticise JK Rowling here, because her exclusive one-off Harry Potter prequel is bound to raise an incredible amount of money for charity. Plus it’s infinitely better than her original idea for a story outline – basically an inky imprint of her arse and the words ‘I am rich! Suck it dickheads!’ angrily scrawled out underneath it in lipstick.

As you remember, JK Rowling claims that The Harry Potter Lexicon unfairly and illegally plagiarises the Harry Potter novels, while the makers of The Harry Potter Lexicon just claim that it’s nothing more than a reference book. And now the case has concluded.

However, we won’t know if JK Rowling or The Harry Potter Lexicon author Steven Vander Ark will win yet, because the judge needs to go away and think about it. And he won’t do that until both JK Rowling and Steven Vander Ark have submitted written summations of their arguments to him. We’re just guessing here, but we’d assume that Vander Ark’s summation is going to be identical to Rowling’s, but with a couple of words changed and cheaper-looking artwork.

Chances are the copyright lawsuit between Harry Potter author JK Rowling and the makers of The Harry Potter Lexicon has had you on the edge of your seat, assuming that you really have nothing better to do than concern yourself with a petty legal squabble between an obscenely rich woman and the makers of a trashy cash-in book that you wouldn’t have even known existed otherwise. If that’s you, then consider this your Super Bowl.

So, to quickly get everyone up to speed, this is what happened. David Vander Ark ran a Harry Potter fan website that JK Rowling gave an award to once. Then there were plans to turn the website into a book, which JK Rowling didn’t like the idea of because she was writing a similar Harry Potter reference book and she thought that Vander Ark’s book would step on its toes. JK Rowling sued David Vander Ark to stop publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, saying that it amounted to theft. And that’s where we are today.

Well, almost. Yesterday was the final day of the court case in New York, and JK Rowling took to the stand once again to angrily declare that she’s being royally ripped off, as the New York Daily News reports:

Author JK Rowling Wednesday trashed the geeky librarian who’s trying to publish a Harry Potter encyclopedia as a literary thief who ripped off her novels. “If I may say so without being arrogant or vain,” Rowling [said], “I think there are funny things in there, and I wrote them.”… This time around, Rowling, wearing a crisp, white jacket, was testier, turning away from her lawyer to speak directly to Patterson as she urged him to defend authors like herself against plagiarists. “I did not fly here because I thought I would lose some sales,” Rowling said. “If this book is allowed to be published, the floodgates will open….I see this as an incredibly important case. Are we or are we not the owners of our own work?”

JK Rowling has a point. If she loses this case, then web nerds everywhere will be able to make their own hastily-compiled reference books – not just about Harry Potter, but about any rubbish, inexplicably popular series of kid’s books. It might be Harry Potter today, but tomorrow it’ll be Clifford The Big Red Dog. Is that something you want on your conscience? Is it?

Anyway, nobody’s going to know who’s come out on top of this case for a while, because the judge has requested that both JK Rowling and Steven Vander Ark hand in written summations of their arguments for him to peruse before coming to a conclusion. And if the Harry Potter books are anything to go by, JK Rowling’s summation is going to be about four billion pages long and full of about 18 pointless Quidditch matches. So don’t expect a result for a while.

Read more:

Harry Potter ‘Lexicon’ trial gets testier - New York Daily News

That’s because yesterday JK Rowling made it into court to speak about her outrage that a third-party Harry Potter reference book, The Lexicon Of Harry Potter, was being published without her say-so. “We all know I’ve made enough money.

hat’s absolutely not why I’m here,” JK Rowling told the courtroom. And that sounds fair – quite often the mega-wealthy lose the thrill of making money and replace it with a new interest.

It’s rare for a court case about a reference book to make a lot of headlines – we can only really think of the time that Britney Spears wrote her 1,200-page tome The Unbearable Lightness Of Being: The Knickerless Perspective back in 2006 – but that was before anyone tried writing a Harry Potter reference book.

As you’re probably quite sick of hearing now, JK Rowling has launched a lawsuit against publisher RDR Books because of its intent to publish The Harry Potter Lexicon, a third-party Harry Potter encyclopedia that will directly compete with JK Rowling’s own forthcoming Harry Potter encyclopedia.

JK Rowling’s court case started yesterday in New York, and it opened with a bang – JK Rowling herself took to the stand herself to defend against accusations that she just didn’t want to see anyone else make money from Harry Potter. And, to be fair, JK Rowling looked all wet-eyed and Princess Dianaish. Reuters reports:

When asked what Potter meant to her, the mother-of-three said: “I really don’t want to cry, because I am British … It’s like asking how do you feel about your child.” “This is very personal to me,” said Rowling, who wrote the first Potter book as a poverty-stricken single mother and is now estimated by The Sunday Times to be worth about $1 billion. “I am an author — 17-years of my work is being exploited here. This is not about money.”

And this lawsuit hasn’t just affected JK Rowling’s plans for her Harry Potter encyclopedia – she also claims that the stress of the court case has ‘decimated’ her creativity and has postponed her big Harry Potter follow-up book.

In fact, JK Rowling says that the book might not ever see the light of day now, thanks to the accompanying mental anguish of what she’s going through now.

Look, we’re all thinking the same thing here – let’s all go away and write a knocked-off Harry Potter book each.

By the time JK Rowling’s done suing all of us then she won’t have it in her to ever write another book again. And that’ll be one less person’s stupendous success to be bitterly jealous about, right?

Read more: Rowling tells court she’s stopped working – Reuters

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.

Read more:

Potter Lexicon legal battle begins – Press Association

No. No they're not. They can't be because the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, has admitted that she's suffered from depression and battled suicidal thoughts before.

Of course, this all happened before Harry Potter got successful and JK Rowling got preposterously rich and stuff. Now any time JK Rowling gets a bit sad she'll go to a poor person's house, buy their furniture and pets for a tenner and set it all on fire in front of them until she's happy again. Works every time.

You'd think that famous people would be the happiest people on Earth, wouldn't you? They have fame, success, power, wealth, access to top-notch cosmetic surgeons, nice hair, expensive shoes, children with invented names, illogical religious beliefs and a constant access to any number of willing sexual partners. But sometimes that isn't the case, because a lot of celebrities have tried to kill themselves in the past.

It's true – Halle Berry tried to kill herself and Tom Jones tried to kill himself and Owen Wilson tried to kill himself. That's literally every celebrity in the world. Admittedly, aside from Owen Wilson – who was found in his home with blood oozing from his slashed wrists – neither of the other two actually attempted suicide, but just entertained the thought of it so they could use the experience in an anecdote years later to show how successful they've subsequently become, but it still sort of counts.

It must do, because Harry Potter creator JK Rowling has just done that exact thing. In an interview with a student magazine, JK Rowling announced that there was this time once that she got a little bit miserable:

"The thing that made me go for help was probably my daughter. She was something that earthed me, grounded me, and I thought, this isn't right, this can't be right, she cannot grow up with me in this state. We're talking suicidal thoughts here, we're not talking "I'm a little bit miserable"… I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never. What's to be ashamed of? I went through a really rough time and I am quite proud that I got out of that."

In the end, JK Rowling went and had some cognitive behavioural therapy to snap her out of it, and it worked. Now JK Rowling is a beacon of inspiration for all the other suicidal depressives in the world – she's living proof that all it takes to get out of a suicidal funk is a guilt-making baby, some therapy and the ability to write the most successful childrens' book franchise in history and become richer than the Queen out of it. Anyone can do it.

But why has JK Rowling decided to speak out about her depression now? Did the topic come up naturally in the conversation? Is this a sneaky first step towards JK Rowling writing trashy self-help books? Or is it part of JK Rowling's ongoing tactic of discussing things that have happened to her in the past to help her think up something to come after Harry Potter? We think it might be.

JK Rowling has already visited her old house and now she's recounting her almost-suicide. But surely that's it now – surely JK Rowling can't go on dredging up past memories to hold off writing a Harry Potter follow-up, can she? Because, honestly, it's just a matter of time before JK Rowling gives an explosive interview about The Time I Woke Up And Thought It Was Thursday But It Was Actually Wednesday, and we don't know how we'd cope with that.

Read more:

JK Rowling: I've thought about suicide – Now 

Harry Potter fan Steven Vander Ark is slowly coming to realise this, because he's trying to publish a third-party Harry Potter reference book, Harry Potter Lexicon, and JK Rowling is doing her best to sue his balls off about it.

It just goes to show that JK Rowling won't allow any unauthorised Harry Potter merchandise to hit the shops. But, hey, that doesn't mean you have to tell her about that container of shoddy Far-Eastern lead-painted Dobby The House Elf choking aids that we've just had shipped into the country, OK?

You'd have thought that JK Rowling would have had enough of Harry Potter by now. Yes, admittedly the Harry Potter series has bought her global fame, an impossible level of wealth and the adoration of every literate child on the planet.

But, still, having to pretend to be grateful every time a waddling brat hands you a scrap of paper with a shitty crayon drawing of Ron Weasley when all you want to do is pick them up by their hair and throw them down the nearest well must be exhausting.

However, JK Rowling refuses to leave Harry Potter alone. Although the series of Harry Potter books may be over, JK Rowling still has the money from the next two – or maybe three – Harry Potter movies to come, plus whatever pennies she can wring out of the still rubbish-sounding Harry Potter theme park and the hopeless-sounding Harry Potter musical.

And yet, JK Rowling still plans to coin it in some more by cobbling together a Harry Potter encyclopedia that she can flog to the millions of kids who'd buy a dirty AIDS needle if it had the words 'Harry Potter' stamped on them.

Trouble is, it looks like another writer might beat JK Rowling to the punch. And JK Rowling is fuming about it, as the Associated Press reports:

In papers filed for a lawsuit in Manhattan, J.K. Rowling says she feels betrayed by a fan, Steven Vander Ark, for his role in trying to publish an unauthorized reference work, "Harry Potter Lexicon." Ark is editor of a Web site containing a fan-created collection of essays and encyclopedic material on the Potter universe, including lists of spells and potions found in the books, a catalog of magical creatures and a who's who in the wizarding world… "I am deeply troubled by the portrayal of my efforts to protect and preserve the copyrights I have been granted in the Harry Potter books," she wrote in court papers filed Wednesday in a lawsuit.

That's the main problem. In the past JK Rowling has been hugely supportive of the various Harry Potter fan-sites – and often uses them to communicate with her fans – but as soon as one of them tries to collate anything into something that stops JK Rowling from squeezing every last penny she can out of the speccy little wizard, she throws a shit-fit.

So who's right and who's wrong here? Is JK Rowling right to see Harry Potter Lexicon as a shameless cash-in designed to deflate her own pre-announced ideas? Or is Steven Vander Ark right to think that JK Rowling's being a terrible control freak who can't stand seeing other people happy? Or are we right to want to take every Happy Potter book, DVD or piece of merchandise ever made, throw it on a big fire and skip around it sort of like the Nazis did but this is OK because it's about Harry Potter?

Oh, we're right? There's a surprise.

Read more:

JK Rowling Bashes 'Harry Potter Lexicon' – Associated Press 

By writing the final Harry Potter book at some point over the last 12 months, JK Rowling scored herself a runner-up spot on the Time Person of The Year List – she would have come first if it wasn't for that bloody Vladimir Putin – and that seems to have made her wonder out loud about writing another Harry Potter book. Don't get too excited, though, because the new Harry Potter book is at least a decade away – coming after the final Harry Potter movie, the opening of the Harry Potter theme park, the Harry Potter On Ice tour and the vastly unsuccessful Harry Potter Sings Julio Iglesias CD of Spanish language seduction ballads planned for March 2014.

If 2007 was the year that JK Rowling put an end to Harry Potter – finally publishing the last Harry Potter book Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – then 2008 will be the year that JK Rowling forgets about Harry Potter completely and moves on with her life, only limiting her mentions of Harry Potter to the times that she opens her mouth, writes stuff down or thinks about anything at all.

And it'll be a busy year for JK Rowling, because she's got several balls to juggle. There's her first adult novel to write, and some kind of 'political fairy tale' as well – plus Rowling needs to find adequate time to strut around her country-sized mansion in a dress made out of knitted rubies eating money sandwiches and pooing coins – but mainly she has to keep alluding to another Harry Potter book like some sort of awful tease.

After coming third in the Time Person Of The Year List – don't get jealous, you won it last year – JK Rowling has decided to announce her vague intentions to possibly write another Harry Potter book eventually if she feels like it and enough people want to read it. Speaking to Time, Rowling said:

"There have been times since finishing, weak moments, when I've said: 'Yeah, all right' to the eighth novel. If, and it's a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the (wizarding) world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I've already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let's give it 10 years."

A Harry Potter book that isn't about Harry Potter? Surely not. So who could this new Harry Potter book be about? Not Dobby or Snape or Dumbledore or the owl or one of the Weasley twins or Voldemort because they're all dead. By our estimations, that means the new book will either be about the married adventures of Hermione and Ron, some sort of ghastly Son Of Harry Potter next-generation affair or a thousand-page book all about the zany adventures of that big moving painting of Dawn French from the third Harry Potter film.

You know what this means though – it means that everyone who signed that petition for more Harry Potter books last summer has been heard. We have a voice! Maybe now that we've convinced JK Rowling to write another Harry Potter book we can all gang up and try to convince another billionaire to earn more multi-million windfalls by cynically returning to franchises they promised us were dead because nothing they've done since has even been remotely successful in comparison. People power! Woo!

Read more:

Rowling 'may pen eighth Harry book' – Press Association

At some point between Christmas and the new year, there's going to be an ITV documentary broadcast entitled JK Rowling … A Year in the Life, all about Harry Potter creator JK Rowling and her adventures completing Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. But the documentary also shows what JK Rowling gets up to in her spare time which – in between posing for giant statues of herself made from one giant diamond and offering the poor £50 to spend a week as JK's Dancing Monkey Slave – mainly involves going to places where she used to live and crying a lot.

Even though she's quite old, 2007 will stand out as one of JK Rowling's most emotional years. She's experienced just about every human emotion on a grand scale over the last 12 months, from heartache at deciding to kill Harry Potter to relief at changing her mind at the last minute, from pride at seeing Harry Potter's naked penis performing solo in sold-out shows to such brazen celebration of her own flesh that she whapped her bra out for some kids.

But none of this could come close to the emotional sledgehammer of returning to the place where she wrote the first ever Harry Potter book Harry Potter And The Weeping Genital Sores and its more successful follow-up Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone – an incident that was fortunately being recorded for a Christmassy ITV documentary all about JK Rowling's year.

On December 30, ITV will broadcast JK Rowling … A Year in the Life. It's the first time JK Rowling has ever allowed cameras to document her life and, as such, the first chance she's ever had to show the world that she's not a completely humourless, emotion-free robot who takes herself so seriously that it's uncomfortable to watch.

And the easiest way for her to do that was to go back to the flat where Harry Potter was born and sob a bit. According to The Press Association, part of the documentary sees JK Rowling return to the Leith flat where she finished writing the first Harry Potter book, only to find that the new residents have Harry Potter books in their bedroom. Rowling said:

"This is really the room where I finished Philosopher's Stone, here. This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat. I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, 'Well, I want to write,' and I wrote the book and, 'What is the worst that can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal. It's really back to the wall time here'. For years now I've felt that if it all disappeared, and some days I do feel like 'is it real?', then this is where I'd come back to, this would be my base line, I'd be back in Leith."

Admittedly she'd return to Leith to bulldoze it and use it for the site of a peculiarly skaghead-heavy offshoot of The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter theme park, but it's nice that she's thought about it.

And even nicer that JK Rowling has finally shown some emotion for once. She'll win a lot of fans with her teary outburst. Not enough to make anyone buy the next book she writes that isn't about Harry Potter, admittedly, but still quite a lot.

If only we could shake the feeling that JK Rowling was only crying because she realised that she used to live in a flat that's smaller than the room where she currently keeps all her fancy hats in her new house…

Read more:

JK Rowling in return to former flat - Press Association