News thread - J.K. Rowling

[Spock]

No worries, a year is more than enough time to presume those here have read things.

[jammi567]

in recent news, she was at a New York conference where, along with Stephen King, read pasages from their latest books. Jo also answered some big questions (from the bottom link below):

- Other than Harry, Jo would most want to bring Hagrid into the real world.
- There's more to Aunt Petunia than meets the eye, and we'll find out what's unique about her in book seven.
- Don't expect Dumbledore to pull a Gandalf.
- Dumbledore IS really dead. "Everyone needs to move through the 5 stages of grief" and get past his death. She also apologizes to DumbledoreIsNotDead.com for ruining the purpose of their site.
- Jo's future after Potter includes taking a long break from writing. She also plans to release a young children's book (currently half written) that is shorter than any Potter novel.
- The librarians in the Potter novels have to be evil, otherwise the students would have nice librarians to help them find all the information they need. "Hermione wouldn't have to do any work!"
- Author Salman Rushdie came up with his son to ask, after a detailed theory, if Snape is good or bad. Jo replied that "your opinion was correct." Rushdie's opinion, unfortunately, was hard to follow.
- After being asked if there was one question fans should have asked by now but haven't, Jo couldn't reference any question in particular.
- While taking a shower before the reading today, Jo said that she had come up with a different title for book seven that would work better than her current title. No word on which title will be used, though.
- Stephen King said he was scared of Death Eaters, to which Jo replied, "I scared Stephen King."
- Moderator Soledad O'Brien asked the three authors who from their books they'd invite to dinner. Stephen immediately said he'd invite Harry and Hermione.
- While Jo is listing the characters who she'd invite to dinner, she names the trio but then pauses. The crowd begins to shout out other characters, but Jo responds, "I'm the only one who knows who lives through the series," accidentally implying that she could only list characters who make it through the final book. Her final two choices (after realizing what she said) were Dumbledore and Hagrid.

[Spock]

Fantastic article, Thanks BIG TIME for the news update, I never heard a word about this on the telly or on the web.

[jammi567]

Only on Mugglenet will you be able to read the latest news to do with the books, movies and J.K.

[jammi567]

Here's a transcript of the first, and second, nights of "An evening with Harry, Carrie and Gwarp".

[jammi567]

JK Rowling has been dubbed by Forbes magazine the world's ninth highest earning celebrity. Apparently, she rakes in a cool $145 per minute, while making $77 per minute last year. Hannah Clark of the magazine, said: "With the $145 she earns every minute, Harry Potter author JK Rowling could buy more than a few boxes of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, one of the young wizard's favourite sweets."

We should probably take these figures with a grain of salt, especially since Jo brought up the topic on Richard & Judy this past June. "Initially people were reporting, and they still do frequently report much more than I got and I'm not pretending I'm not hugely wealthy because I am. But sometimes they print figures that certainly my accountant wouldn't recognize."

[cee2lee2]

Originally Posted by jammi567

JK Rowling has been dubbed by Forbes magazine the world's ninth highest earning celebrity. Apparently, she rakes in a cool $145 per minute, while making $77 per minute last year. Hannah Clark of the magazine, said: "With the $145 she earns every minute, Harry Potter author JK Rowling could buy more than a few boxes of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, one of the young wizard's favourite sweets."

We should probably take these figures with a grain of salt, especially since Jo brought up the topic on Richard & Judy this past June. "Initially people were reporting, and they still do frequently report much more than I got and I'm not pretending I'm not hugely wealthy because I am. But sometimes they print figures that certainly my accountant wouldn't recognize."

However much it is, I hope she enjoys every penny.....she's given all of us tons of reading pleasure and there's more to come.

[jammi567]

Totally true.

[Butterbeer]

she sure as hell showed hollywood and the tolkien family how to negotiate rights!

hoooboy!

good on her!

[jammi567]

How?

[Butterbeer]

well, she negotiated incredibly lucrative rights for the movies and merchandising and played hardball scottish style to a degree that knocked the wesals at the studios for six!

the tolkien family sold the rights for the movies for peanuts, the divvies.

[jammi567]

really.

[inked]

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/artic...67/story.jhtml



Sep 8 2008 4:30 PM EDT
'Harry Potter' Author J.K. Rowling Wins Copyright-Infringement Lawsuit
Judge blocks publication of proposed reference book, awards $6,750 in damages.

By Shawn Adler

Five months after author J.K. Rowling was nearly brought to tears while testifying in front of a New York courtroom, the woman behind "Harry Potter" had reason to smile Monday (September 8) with news that a judge had ruled in her favor in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against RDR Books, publishers of "The Harry Potter Lexicon."

In addition to blocking publication of the reference tome, Judge Robert P. Patterson awarded Rowling and co-plaintiff Warner Bros. Entertainment $6,750 in statutory damages, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"I took no pleasure at all in bringing legal action and am delighted that this issue has been resolved favourably," Rowling wrote in a statement. "I went to court to uphold the right of authors everywhere to protect their own original work. The court has upheld that right."

At issue in the case was the U.S. legal doctrine of fair use, a complicated, ambiguous law that seeks to protect copyright holders from unsanctioned use of their work. Rowling claimed in April, and again in a recent statement, that the proposed Potter reference guide stepped over the line from acceptable usage into "wholesale theft."

"The proposed book took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own. Now the court has ordered that it must not be published," she wrote. "Many books have been published which offer original insights into the world of Harry Potter. The 'Lexicon' just is not one of them."

Reference guides, of course, are published all the time. In order to avoid copyright infringement, it is necessary to divine the "purpose and character of the use." In simpler terms, the work must be "transformative" — so does it add to the culture's appreciation and/or knowledge of a work, or does it merely seek to supersede the original?

This was the point of contention most argued in the court case, with lawyers for Rowling insisting that the proposed book "takes too much and does too little." In other words, it adds little or no commentary or criticism.

Judge Patterson touched upon this distinction in his ruling.

"While the 'Lexicon,' in its current state, is not a fair use of the Harry Potter works, reference works that share the 'Lexicon' 's purpose of aiding readers of literature generally should be encouraged rather than stifled," he said, according to the WSJ. "[The] 'Lexicon' [however] appropriates too much of Rowling's creative work for its purposes as a reference guide."

Before becoming a book, "The Harry Potter Lexicon" was a Web site run by librarian Steve Vander Ark. The site was repeatedly praised by Rowling early this decade.
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This is sad because of the former regard for which JKR held the LEXICON, awarded it special recognition, utilized it in writing (her own words!), and I think it is driven by the commodifiers of HP - the studios. They have been waging an entirely new extension of copyright understanding from internet to publications for years.

This ruling is going to have dire effects in the long-run twisting to be performed by lawyers. One potential ramification is the abortion of all fan sites and discussion with trademarked words in their domain names. The list is rather extensive, to put it mildly. Another ramification is that legitimate critical analysis will be stymied by the threat of lawsuits over titles and alleged infringement. This has happened already. See the introduction to THE IVORY TOWER and HARRY POTTER edited by Lana A. Whited (2002, University of Missouri Press).

The punitive damages are miniscule. The run will have to be destroyed. Fandom loses. And I am afraid that JKR does too. She now appears ridikkulously like a legal boggart or Umbridge clone. I hope this was at the insistence of her lawyers and was forced on her as an imperious curse action, but I have anxiety that it was not so.

I would have purchased the LEXICON encyclopedia for refernce work. When and if the JKR encyclopedia came out, I would have purchased it also. There was not, is not, and never would have been a substantial threat to JKR's work or the commodifier's-income stream by this work. This is very sad on many levels. The legal dam has just begun its work.

The examples of Tolkien and Lewis mitigate against this stand by JKR and her legal team.

[GrayMouser]

JK Rowling's patriotism.

The Single Mother's Manifesto

But wait, some will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?

No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.


I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s.

....A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...fset=12&page=2

Nice to see when there's so much unabashed greed and I've-got-mine-and-to-Hell-with-everybody-else in the political culture these days.

[inked]

Thanks, GM. Excellent piece and I read the whole thing!