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Orson Scott Card Blasts J.K. Rowling's Lawsuit
Posted by
timothy
on Thu May 01, 2008 01:52 PM
from the funnier-than-I-thought-he'd-be dept.
from the funnier-than-I-thought-he'd-be dept.
Wanker writes "In the wake of a lawsuit by J.K. Rowling against the author of a Harry Potter encyclopedia, the Greensboro Rhino Times has an article by Orson Scott Card blasting J.K. Rowling for 'letting herself be talked into being outraged over a perfectly normal publishing activity.' Orson Scott Card has hit the nail on the head. He understands that authors re-use each others' ideas all the time, and certainly Ender's Game gets its share of re-use. Did Rowling's success go to her head?"
Card lays out (something like tongue-in-cheek) some of the similarities between the story in Ender's Game and in the Potter series: "A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader." (And that's just to get started.)
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Technology: Rowling Sues Harry Potter Lexicon 527 comments
Snape kills Trinity with Rosebud writes "Apparently famous authors don't like it if you try to make a buck using their imaginary property because J.K. Rowling is suing the publishers of the Harry Potter Lexicon for infringement. This should prove an interesting test case for fair use given that the lexicon contains mostly factual information about the series, not copies of the books' text. Of course, both sides seem a bit touchy about imaginary property rights, with Rowling's lawyers being miffed after being told to print it themselves when they asked for a paper copy of the lexicon's website, and the lexicon website itself using one of those insipid right click disabling scripts."
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The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Score:5, Insightful)
Aw, christ, I'll just put my lawyer on speed dial.
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They vigorously defend what they consider theirs. The reason they don't go after Good Times and etc. isn't because they don't want to, it's because they already know they'll loose. They have trademarks on the visual representations but the stories themselves are public domain.
Disney is STILL a major copyright lobbist. And right now what they'd like to
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Story: Public domain
Likenesses created by Disney: Disney's
Yes, for right or wrong, Disney will demand compensation for everything that they legally can. But their lawyers are very good and know where the lines are.
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I'm pretty sure that if you paint, as you put it, the "Disney versions" then Disney would likely be in their rights to do that.
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Claim: Disney forced the removal of murals featuring their cartoon figures from the walls of three Florida day care centers.
Status: TRUE
Origins:
Disney discovered in 1989 that three Hallandale, Florida, day care centers had 5-foot-high likenesses of trademarked Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Goofy painted on their walls, Disney threatened to go to court if the centers did not remove the drawings. The threat of legal action did not need
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A quick peek [youtube.com] and you'll see why Disney and Iwerks copped it.
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On the other hand we are talking about taking another's work, and simply taking all the details in it and compiling them into a work you call your own.
It should also be noted that J.K. never had a problem with the encylopedia till the people who were running it decided to make a book out of it and sell it. When it was still a 'just' fan created work she ac
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Re:The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that a writer could make fanastical amounts of money (and let's be honest here, there are only a handful of authors that have had the kind of success Rowlings has had) simply by writing is a pretty new one. Do you think Homer got royalties every time a copy of the Illiad was produced? Do you think the Akkadian kings went after people that made copies of the Gilgamesh epic, or added their own bits to it? The story of world literature is one of works being added to, chronicled and sometimes even being outright stolen (the Hebrews did it when they ripped off big chunks of the Sumero-Akkadian creation and cosmographical myths). Do you think world literature over the five or six thousand years that it has existed (many times longer if you count oral transmission of stories) has suffered because for the overwhelming majority of that time authors had little or no protection against plagiarism and unauthorized derivative works?
Parent
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You've hit the nail on the head. Damned near everything is derivative to one extent or another, and making commentaries of older stories, and even expanding them, is a tradition likely as old as humanity itself. Unfortunately, in this age of inviolate intellectual property rights, the storyteller has become more important than the story.
Rowling's case is a little different in that her publicist and publishing company have created something of a cult of personality among her fans (most of whi
What works for science works for art (Score:3, Informative)
He is not, in fact, the first man to say that! [wikipedia.org] (WP doesn't mention the quote stolen by the far more famous Newton). The fact is that all art is based on previous art.
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http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20080406.html [schlockmercenary.com]
has the one of the better versions of that quote.
Prefer the Pile of Cat Poo or Pile of Dog Poo? (Score:2)
Which jerk am I supposed to be rooting for in this story? Card had one good book decades ago and has been riding its success ever since.
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The one who understands copyright law.
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And that makes him a jerk how, exactly ?
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The sequels and the parallel to the original story is where the real character development and writing style is found. Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind are MUCH more thought provoking and easier to identify with. The characters become much more real, and less OMG DBZ SUPERSAIJANTIME-esk.
His parallel with Enders Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets focu
Card should stick to writing stories (Score:4, Insightful)
The Lexicon authors may well be within their rights to have produced that work, but not for reasons that are based in the rather tortured screed he's offering up.
So... one can find parallels between many good stories. Does that automatically erode all intellectual property claims? Does it even directly relate to the specific claims in the Rowling suit? Hardly.
So... Card has publicly admitted on at least one occasion where he's borrowed from someone else. And he also tells people in his books when a character is gay! Look how much of a better person he is than Rowling!
And this dig is pure malice:
" The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote."
Yeah, Orson. That quote just *oozes* personal security with what you've done.
Ask yourself this: after reading the piece, which do you have a clearer understanding of:
(1) Copyright and other intellectual property law
(2) Which particulars Rowling is invoking and where her case goes wrong
(3) How disgusted Orson Scott Card is with Rowling
I'm seeing a lot of #3 and not very much of #1 or #2.
If the suit lowers the dignity of Rowling, Card seems perfectly ready to sacrifice his own by basically marshalling the resources of his talents.... to call Rowling a poopyhead.
Ouch (Score:2)
"Rowling has nowhere to go and nothing to do now that the Harry Potter series is over. After all her literary borrowing, she shot her wad and she's flailing about trying to come up with something to do that means anything."
I tend to agree. I think she's being a huge self absorbed twit over this whole thing.
I think I'll wait... (Score:2)
Way to miss the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
So obviously there's something going on in this case that's different than the others. This is even more obvious when you consider that Rowling was quite happy to have the text in question available on the Internet.
It's that there's a possibility that the Lexicon may use far too much of the original text to be considered an original work for publishing purposes. Apparently Rowling considers this to be the case.
So it comes down to the old, "it's all right with me if it's up for free, but when you want to start charging for it, I'm going to have to come down on you."
Scott has it wrong (Score:3, Informative)
er... dang. Freudian typo (Score:2)
I'm sorry... (Score:2)
Creating a book who's plot is in various vague ways similar to a previous book is not the same in my opinion as selling a product which only makes money because it uses the exact same characters and names in its marketing.
Rather than a black and white issue, I think we have a continuum. Let's look at one extreme end - would it have been OK if the Hollywood Harry Potter films had been produced
obligatory (Score:2)
Fuck JK Rowling (Score:2)
Making a Quick Buck versus Making Commentary (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't fair use (news reporting, educational or criticism, although the publisher tries to pretend the latter) or transformative in any way: van der Ark's Lexicon is a summary of elements in the work. That means that, as a secondary work about Harry Potter, this is much more akin to the Castle Rock case [thelegality.com]: copying fragments of the work.
More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications (like some of the other guidebooks she's produced), while this work is taking the unpaid labour of countless fans who contributed to the Lexicon website and turning it to the personal profit of the site's disgruntled owner (who's cranky because his good buddy "Jo" wouldn't give him a paying job in the UK to edit her own encyclopedia).
The whole imbroglio has been amply covered by the helpful souls at Fandom Wank [journalfen.net] if you want to get a feel for what others besides OSC have said. (Anne Rice has even weighed in!)
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TFA - semi slashdotted (Score:2)
J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz
by Orson Scott Card
April 24, 2008
Can you believe that J.K. Rowling is suing a small publisher because she claims their 10,000-copy edition of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a book about Rowling's hugely successful novel series, is just a "rearrangement" of her own material.
Rowling "feels like her words were stolen," said lawyer Dan Shallman.
Well, heck, I feel like the plot of my novel Ender's Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling.
A young kid growing up in an op
A shame Card also takes some moronic positions... (Score:2)
Striking similarities, indeed (Score:3, Funny)
A useful legal analysis (Score:3, Informative)
It seems there are four issues that are looked at in cases where fair use exceptions are claimed as a defense: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the portion of material used in relation to the original work and finally the effect on the potential market.
The author of the article wrote that typically in analysis of the purpose and character of use, the derivative work involves some extension or transformation. There isn't likely to be much in a lexicon or encyclopedia, so this should cut in favour of Rowling. The author did point out that an analysis of mistakes and plot inconsistencies would involve substantial extension and so could well have a valid defense
With regards to the nature of the copyrighted work, Rowling's books are original pieces of writing (although perhaps not great literature). This is the kind of stuff that copyright is meant to defend, so this is likely to cut in Rowling's favour also.
The article argues that it is the final two issues that the lexicon's author may have traction on. The amount and importance of the portion of work used seems to be the X-factor. The lexicon will no doubt copy a significant amount of material from the Rowling originals but use it in small pieces and put it in a completely context. The author figured this would break on a judge-by-judge basis. One that read the copyright act literally would fall in favour of Rowling, while a judge considering the overall purpose would not.
Finally there was the question of the effect on the potential market. Certainly a lexicon would damage sales of an official Rowling lexicon, but the author felt (and I would agree) that a Rowling original would likely be a bigger draw for readership. Rowling has access to more material than anyone, and her encyclopedia would likely be a better piece of work for a collector. The author figured that Rowling's claim here was weak.
All-in-all, it sounded like who gets selected as judge would play a major role in the result. It is possible that some uses may be fine (a detailed analysis of inconsistencies and mistakes, for example) while other uses may have to be deleted (e.g. an encyclopedic or dictionary-type use).
Oh, look, it's OSC being a moron again... (Score:5, Insightful)
To clarify:
The Lexicon website consisted for the most part of entries where the editors had gone through the books, chopped out the various bits describing the element at hand and plopped them in the entry. The amount of straight quoting was huge, the amount of barely reworded items possibly even larger. Let's go to Dave Langford [ansible.co.uk] for a typical wordcount: "When I checked, the on-line Lexicon's 1500 words on Albus Dumbledore had about 300 words of direct quotation from Rowling (which seemed risky) and linked to a page with some 3000 words of quotes (which seemed suicidal)." This is certainly very useful to fanfic authors, and as long as it was noncommercial, Rowlings quite kindly tolerated it.
Then in a perfect storm of stupidity, RDR Books decided that obviously this meant they could publish it at 24.95 a pop. Rowlings and her publishers said "uh, no". I'll note that they spent two months trying to get a manuscript out of RDR or Steve Vander Ark, and were informed that they should "just hit print on the website." Yes, the website that *mostly consisted of quotes and rewordings*. Eventually they realized how suicidal that was, and produced a hacked down manuscript that *still* took large amounts straight from her wording.
And like most bad lawsuits, it'll make bad law. If she wins, other publishers and authors will no doubt push the boundaries to claim that any kind of encyclopedia of their fictional universes is unlawful, even if the writers actually do their own work; and if she loses (highly unlikely, but if) other authors will feel like they need to be a bitch to every online effort of this sort, lest they be seen as authorizing similar publishings -- one of the claims that RDR/SVA made was that by tolerating it, she was authorizing it.
The purpose of copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether this is the right way is an altogether different issue, and perhaps not one that is as clearcut as we would imagine. In recent years we have seen how both copyright and patent rules have been abused to hurt the free market, so I think it is time we made some serious changes to the whole IP concept. Perhaps the Open Commons idea is the way to proceed - something where a creative mind case establish a name and a reputation and which can serve as a basis for earning a living.
In many ways I don't think works of creativity should be anybody's property. The very essence of ownership is to exclude others from what you own, which in the case of works of art will mean that fewer get to enjoy it, and also dimishes the creativity, both of the 'owner' and of others who might have been inspired by it.
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Good literature? I've never seen it. I don't know why people bother reading a bunch of made up crap, it's a lot more interesting (and fun) to read about real things that actually happen.
Well, put. This is why there are vocational and technical schools, so those who are not interested don't have to be distracted by trivia.
Some people enjoy exploring intangible ideas. Others simply prefer exploring tangible things.
A liberal arts education is not suited to everyone.
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It wasn't originally a book, but a short story.
Oh, it really IS like a Harry Potter story after all ...
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Other people have. Should the fanfict authors be sued?
There are some things I may never understand. This lady has created a fantasy world that millions of people love, and along the way has gone from a single mom trying desperately to survive, to one of the very richest people in all of human history. What's the harm in letting others participate in this fantasy world? What's the harm in letting others profit from their participation?
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Why is there such a fuss about Harry Potter? Most fantasy has that geek-chic to it, but Harry Potter books are merely glorified childrens' stories, and I know because I've read bits and pieces. Seeing grown men admit to reading Harry potter is like seeing 50 year old women dress like they did when they were barhopping at 21...a sad sight either way.
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Re:Not sure he does "get it" (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent