Harry Potter and the Chamber of Lawsuits

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Muggles rejoice! The day we’ve been simultaneously dreading and anticipating is here. Fans across the world are lining up, decked out in all manner of Gryfindor paraphernalia, ready to enjoy a fresh Harry Potter vehicle for the last time. The reviews are almost unanimously positive and many are forecasting that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 will enjoy the most lucrative opening weekend of all time.

Potter’s success transformed author J.K. Rowling from a single mother living on benefits to a world famous billionaire. But like so many artists have learned, when success comes, so do lawsuits.

Most have been unscrupulous and it’s notable that Rowling has won nearly every decision. Here are our picks for the most interesting, amusing, and preposterous claims from a decade of Potter case law.

Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon

“Harry doesn’t know how long it will take to wash the sticky cream cake off his face. For a civilised young man it is disgusting to have dirt on any part of his body. He lies in the high-quality bathtub, keeps wiping his face, and thinks about Dali’s face, which is as fat as the bottom of Aunt Penny.”

So begins Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon, an absurd counterfeit published in China. The book — a “verbatim translation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit,” with Rowling’s characters simply replacing the denizens of Tolkien’s Middle Earth —  was originally published in 2002 by the Bashu Publishing House. Rowling and her partners at Warner Brothers quickly took action against Bashu and, though it is apparently rare for Chinese courts to rule in favor of foreign companies, they won their decision the very same year.

Bashu was forced to pay a $3,400 fine and issue an apology.

Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly

Nancy Stouffer, an unsuccessful author and co-founder of a bankrupt publishing company, came out publicly against Rowling in 1999. The allegation? That Rowling had actively canabalized a pair of Stouffer’s earlier writings, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and the above-titled Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly.

Rather than wait for Stouffer to bring her to court, Rowling, Warner Brothers and Scholastic filed for an injunction against Stouffer. They won. Not only did the court find that “no reasonable juror could find a likelihood of confusion” between the two works, it also noted that Stouffer had retroactively changed her manuscript to include the world “muggle.”

Although she lost a subsequent appeal, Stouffer’s poorly formatted website suggests she’s not yet given up.

Harry Potter and the Wyrd Sisters

In the fourth installment of Harry Potter, there is wizard prom of sorts. Playing at that dance is a band called the Weird Sisters.

Meanwhile, in the real world, there is a Canadian band named the Wyrd Sisters.

Warner Brothers offered the Winnipeg folk group $50,000 (Canadian) for the rights to use the phonetically identical name in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire but the band refused, instead taking Warner Brothers to court and seeking an injunction against the movie’s release. They received death threats for doing so.

Though a judge denied the injunction and threw the case out, the Weird Sisters were written out of the cinematic version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Which is a shame, as members of Pulp and Radiohead were set to take the stage and release an album under the fictional moniker.

James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing

Immersive worlds like the ones created by Rowling, George Lucas, and Gene Rodenberry sometimes span something called “fanfiction.” Fanfiction, as the name suggests, is when a lover of the original writes a related story or reimagining of the original, using the characters, tropes, and settings made ubiquitous by the source material.

In 2007, G. Norman Lippert, an American computer programmer, wrote James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing as a book for his wife and sons. They loved the originals and simply didn’t want the story to end, so Lippert took matters into his own hands and wrote a novel set eighteen years after the Rowling’s final installment, starring Harry’s son, James. He published the novel online.

Rowling was originally worried and threatened legal action against Lippert. But after he sent her a copy, she relented and supported the Lippert’s work and others like it.

One online site boasts nearly 70,000 such stories.

Harry Potter and the Two Interesting Precedents

While the stories above are mostly cases of Rowling protecting her intellectual property based on long-established case law, two of her other legal victories have set far-reaching precedent.

The first was in Britain, where Rowling filed an injuction against “the person or persons” who had copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix before its release. The idea behind the injunction was to maintain secrecy around the book but it was the first time a British court granted an injunction against unknown or unnamed parties. The precedent was later used by GlaxoSmithKline against anonymous animal rights protesters who’d sent threatening letters.

The second precedent was set here in the States. A man named Steve Vander Ark had wanted to publish a 400 page Potter encyclopedia, complete with annotations, but Rowling herself had plans to do the same. Justice Robert Patterson ruled in her favor, saying Vander Ark’s book was not under the umbrella of fair use and “appropriates too much of Rowling’s creative work for its purposes as a reference guide.” The judge also decided that the release of such a book would harm the sales of Rowling’s own encyclopedia.

Some are concerned that the judge’s ruling could be used to bar similar reference works in relation to books and film, but this seems unlikely. In Patterson’s ruling, he noted that companion books and reference guides were legitimate aids to the reader. His specific problem was with the content of Vander Ark’s work, which he found to be derivative and largely a re-appropriation of Rowling’s novels, as opposed to an honest reference work.

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Of course, these aren’t the only cases Rowling has dealt with in the last decade. Harry Potter and the Scourge of eBay, Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, and Harry Potter and the Gun-Toting Security Guard Who Allegedly Stole Pages from a Book Distribution Center are all sordid tales of their own.

But for now, Rowling and her fans should forget all that and simply enjoy the moment. Harry Potter’s final installment hits theaters tonight and your author will be there, in line, three hours early.

Enjoy the show, everyone.

Related articles

• ‘Harry Potter’ over the years (csmonitor.com)
• What Book Will Fill Harry Potter Gap? (npr.org)
• ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2′ Review: A Muggle Couldn’t Ask for More (moviefone.com)