AP on Lexicon Lawsuit: The Blurry Line in Copyright Law

The Associated Press has posted a summary of the lawsuit over the Lexicon book that began back in October, which does a good job at explaining this whole thing for the less legal inclined among us. The article specifically talks about why this trial, a "fair use" trial, is so tricky:

U.S. rules allow for the "fair use" of copyrighted material in unauthorized works, but there are limits. Journalists may quote from films and books when writing a review. Scholars can use excerpts from a novel while penning an author's biography.

Generally, the call on whether such uses are legal comes down to how much material was taken and how different the end product is from the original work.

Lawrence Pulgram, an intellectual property lawyer who represented Napster in a copyright fight with the rock band Metallica, said deciding where to draw the line is rarely easy.

"Fair use is the most erratically applied doctrine in copyright," he said.

Works like Vander Ark's lexicon fall into one of the tougher categories. It takes the form of an A-to-Z list of the hundreds of characters and place names from her books, followed by brief entries summarizing how they fit into the plot. There is also information on the origin of some of her characters in mythology and folklore.

Rowling and her legal team acknowledged that readers' guides like the lexicon are, in fact, allowed under the law, but made the case that Vander Ark simply took too much material. [Editor Note: To see the pie chart evidence, click here and scroll down]

U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson Jr. indicated that the case could go either way and encouraged both sides to settle. He suggested that a creative negotiation might produce a book that both sides could live with.

Rowling said during her testimony that Vander Ark could still do his book, as long as he changed it to take less of her material.

"I never ever once wanted to stop Mr. Vander Ark from doing his own guide. Never ever," she said, before asking the judge again to block it in its current form.