Slate has an interesting piece today by Tim Wu on J.K. Rowling’s copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon and their plan to publish a fan-written guide to the Potter books. This story goes back a few months, since the original court filings took place in November, and I’ll let Wu’s legal argument speak for itself, but suffice it to say that the suit seems to turn on the question of whether that fictional world is the exclusive property of its author or belongs, at some level, to its readers. Obviously, there’s a lot at stake when one considers the vast commercial potential of any product that carries the Harry Potter name, and Rowling has seen her work pirated over the years in a variety of imaginative ways, including unauthorized translations, scanned copies posted on the internet within hours of the latest book’s release, or the publication of unauthorized sequels in China and India with titles like Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon and Potter in Calcutta. But as Wu points out, this case is different, since Rowling’s lawyers seem intent on expanding her copyright to cover collections of commentaries, essays, and reviews. Wu draws an analogy between readers’ guides and travel books: “Giving Rowling what she wants,” he argues, “would be like giving Egypt the power to control guides to the pyramids.”
What’s particularly interesting to me in this case is the fact that Rowling and her publishers have apparently tolerated the Harry Potter Lexicon as long as it remained exclusively an online phenomenon, where it served their interests by helping to promote the books. In fact, Rowling admits to having used the site as a reference herself, sneaking into internet cafes to check her facts while writing away from home. She now describes herself as “sad and disillusioned” that the publishers of this site would seek to profit from what had previously been a display of obsessive love. If you explore the site, you’ll find that you can click on the cover of any book in the series and find a detailed outline with cross-references, a complete chapter-by-chapter guide with notes and commentary, synopses, pre-publication fan speculation, a day-by-day calendar of events in the book, lists of differences between the U.S. and British editions, and a collection of edits and changes readers have noticed in the text. In the site’s general menu, you can find an encyclopedia of spells, along with guides to magical theory, the history of wizarding, quidditch, magical beasts, and the mysterious world of muggle studies. It’s hard to imagine exactly what a hard copy of this guide to the Potter books could contain that would violate Rowling’s copyright more than the website, except for the simple fact of two covers and a price tag. A book is a saleable commodity, and so might threaten to siphon off a small portion of the commercial empire that has been built on these books, while the website serves as a free reference point for those who love the books enough to spend their time boning up on its more obscure details in the hope that the admissions letter from Hogwarts might still be on its way, carried by a particularly sluggish owl.
As amusing as all this might seem to most writers, who can barely give away their books, there’s a larger question in any writer’s attempt to control what happens to her work once it’s published. Who does a piece of writing belong to? The author? The publisher? The reader? Copyright legally remains with the author, of course, although one might argue that copyright laws are designed to protect not the rights of authors but the commercial interests of publishers. Yet as any student who takes a creative writing class quickly learns, the idea that you own your words is at best a fiction. Words take on new meanings the moment they’re read; readers interpret, and in doing so, they almost inevitably misunderstand your intentions or misconstrue your ideas. A reader who loves your work is often most dangerous: fans believe that they have a special understanding of a book’s characters or ideas, like initiates in a religious cult. In fact, some readers confuse the act of reading with the act of writing, which is why so many readers secretly think they could have written your book, and a few go so far as to become convinced that they did. But in a way, that’s understandable: there’s something uncanny about the act of reading, as we allow another person’s voice to speak within our minds. It’s a form of possession, which we can choose to resist or to which we can joyfully surrender. But the author doesn’t simply cast a spell over us: she has to accept that her words take on their own lives within us, like children who move away, marry, and raise families of their own. In a sense, any writing is an act of exchange. But one might also say that it’s a meeting at the crossroads, where the devil waits to tune your guitar. The growing phenomenon of fan fiction reflects the power of that desire both to possess and to be possessed by a story, as readers are inspired to create their own stories about beloved characters. (Sometimes a little too “beloved,” given how much of that fan fiction consists of erotic fantasy. A fascinating argument on the legal status of such fan fictions by Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program, can be found here. Jenkins argues for “a public right to cultural participation,” noting that “all or at least most fan fiction involve[s] some form of criticism [as in interpretation and commentary] of the original texts upon which it is based.”) Those who write fan fiction, like those readers who contribute to the Harry Potter Lexicon’s online guides, have crossed the line that separates consumers of fiction from writers. But every writer was once just a reader, and no matter how many books you’ve published, the voices of writers you love never stop whispering in your mind.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, God creates by the word, but he soon finds that his words have a way of taking on their own meanings. In the poem’s terms, that’s a fall from grace, but it’s also an act of love and the price of creation. Words are not tame commodities, but more like a currency that passes between us. Even the wonderfully imaginative J.K. Rowling draws her stories from a common well of myth, fable, and popular culture. She has every right to her vast success, but it saddens me to see a series of stories that began with such creative energy reduced to an impulse simply to claim as much of that currency as possible.