Steve Vander Ark wants an agreement with J.K. Rowling

Dodał(a): Seweryn Lipoński
2008-11-24 21:45
Odsłon: 3512
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"I would be more than happy to satisfy the concerns of Ms. Rowling," says Steve Vander Ark. The conflict about copyright infringement goes on, the author of the unofficial Harry Potter encyclopedia still believes it will be published.

Steve Vander Ark / Fot. Dtobias / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Steve-vander-ark-sectus-cropped-2007-07-19.jpg / lic. GNU Free

Some internet polls have shown that more than 50 percent of Harry Potter fans supported Ms. Rowling in this case. Have you experienced any signs of hostility from them?
- I think a lot more than 50% supported Rowling. I know I would have. As I mentioned above, I never would have wanted to do something against her wishes. I’m just as much a fan as anyone else. There's been plenty of hostility from fans, sure. I wish people would be able to know my heart. I wish that people who write horrible, cruel things would think about the fact that I'm a real person and a true fan, just like them. It's so strange to know that no one will ever know all the details of what happened, of what things I was told by lawyers from both sides, of mistakes I made and now regret, of things I did with the best of intentions only to have them misconstrued or twisted horribly, and so on. No one can really understand just how dreadful this kind of thing is and how little control a person like me has in it.

Well, you and Mr. Rapoport weren’t fully innocent, too. You assured that the lexicon wasn't a plagiarism of Ms. Rowling's books - meanwhile, it turned out that some parts were simply copied from the two companion books.
- There was very little actual word-for-word 'copying' from either the novels or the companion books. What did happen was that we used some very similar language. There were a few places where exact phrases did end up in the book without being in quotation marks and I didn't catch them. That was a mistake on my part in the editing process. As a matter of fact, the entries from „Quiddich Through Ages” and „Fantastic Beasts” contained only a little bit of the information from the companion books, and it wasn't copied word for word. Also, the introduction in the manuscript had a note sending readers back to those companion books to find out all the stuff we intentionally left out. What the judge was objecting to was not the text itself but the fact that by including those entries at all, even if not copied, we could take away from the sales of those books. The key point was that since some sections of the companion books are already in encyclopedia format, the judge was saying that those parts of the Lexicon book weren't 'transformative' because they presented them in the format which they were already in. That's really a more important criticism than copying.

You also said that the entries contained numerous references to other dictionaries and companions - still, the court proved there were only four ones. And many of your supporters in this case trusted your explanations. Don't you think that you and Mr. Rapoport kind of deceived the public?
- We used a lot of external sources, but we didn't credit each instance in the manuscript. It wasn't intended to be a scholarly work with endnotes for things like that. I do have a bibliography of the sources used and there are something like thirty individual resources on that list. The court only noted that we didn't cite those sources, not that we didn't use them at all. One of the more frustrating aspects of this whole thing is that the manuscript that went to the court was only partially edited. Because of the time constraints, we were editing at the same time as the British publisher was anglicising and that the French translator was translating. We were sending emails back and forth with suggestions, changes, edits, even complete sections added, etc. Those revisions and corrections were never included in the version of the manuscript sent to Rowling's people shortly after 31 October, which was the version that we ended up defending in court.