Jo Row, Deatheater

A short stint in the plutocracy has evidently been enough to convince Jo Rowling that her interests lie with the Deatheaters. From Mediabistro:

So there's this Harry Potter Lexicon website that basically collates all the information from the seven-volume series—people, places, spells, rules for quidditch—written by fans and edited by a librarian named Steve Vander Ark. And J.K. Rowling liked the site, she really did. She even gave it an "award" a few years back. But when Vander Ark and RDR Books decided to put out a print edition of the lexicon, Rowling stopped feeling the love, and the AP's David B. Caruso reports that she and Warner Bros., which also has a substantial stake in Potter intellectual property, are getting all Avada Kedavra on everybody's ass, a term of art meaning they're planning to throw money at lawyers who will drag the little guys through one proceeding after another until they give in.

This suit is properly viewed as part of the long standing effort of publishers and others to push ever more expansive views of the notion of "intellectual property." Since publishers have been fairly successful in promoting this new version of enclosure in statute and litigation, I won't venture a guess on the ultimate legal adjudication. My instincts agree with mediabistro's though - I think this has more to do with legal bullying than with the law.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec...
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st...
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more