Well, I have to say I find the whole thing very fascinating. It turns out Rowling DID try to work with Steve, but he wasn’t willing to back off. Which seems silly to me. Furthermore, some of the folks on Mugglenet wisely pointed out that if Rowling eventually lost — let’s say this went to the Supreme Court or something — the outcome could have dire effects on people who write fanfic or keep fan sites for authors.

You know, there are a lot of authors who DON’T want any fan sites at all, and although webbish people sort of accepted what Rowling did by allowing fan sites and fan fic and all that to exist as the status quo, she was actually setting a really great example by effectively saying, “Hey, yeah. That’s cool. Go have fun, just don’t make money off MY intellectual property unless you’re adding analysis; you need to have your own creative vision if you’re going to publish a book about the HP universe.”

We’ve all sort of gotten to the point where we think the web is our place to do whatever we like, but that’s not quite accurate. When it comes to another person’s work, it really, really, really is important to be super-careful about how you approach things. Trust me, I know.

Anyway, it’s sad that Steve Vander Ark, and more importantly his publishing house, couldn’t work things out before Rowling and WB had to drag them to court. On the other hand, I’d be interested in hearing his opinion on why the book is publishable under the fair use clause. No chance he’ll log on here, is there?

If you go there and scroll to episode 142 there’s a great episode about the trial. It came about way before the verdict, but still.

“How do I (Steve Vander Ark) know that they borrowed the timeline from the Lexicon? Because I had made a tiny, stupid little typo on my day-by-day calendar of the first book. I had accidentally put the first visit of Harry and Ron to Hagrid’s cabin on Saturday instead of Friday. I did that because I write Monday-through-Friday schedules all the time as part of my job, filling information onto week grids. The last square of the calendar I work on usually is Friday, so I put the visit to Hagrid’s cabin in the last square without thinking. That typo is reproduced in the “official” timeline on the DVD.”

Also: Jo Rowling did indeed give the HP Lexicon her Fan Site Award in 2004. Again, it’s sad to see a good relationship come to this sort of an end; we know that she appreciated Vander Ark’s work up to a point. But at what point was it plagiarism, or IP theft, rather than a dedicated fan doing his best to put together a complete timeline?