Squeeze Copyright to Stifle Creativity

The Harry Potter brouhaha playing out in British courts threatens the "fair use" provision of copyright law, or so says New York Times business columnist, Joe Nocera, in A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity. In a tight nutshell, the case involves a website publisher who announced he was about to present a companion book (long a standard practice in the fiction world) for profit. The problem? The product for sale was to be a portion of the Harry Potter Lexicon, also very much for the profit of the publisher. Nocera claims the "fair use" portion of copyright law, "allows anyone to create something new based on someone else’s art."

Perhaps J. K. Rowling and the handlers of her empire don't think an encyclopedia of Harry Potter terminology is something new. After all, it was Rowling who created the Harry Potter world and everything therein. Nocera implies Rowling is suing because no one asked her permission (read: paid for a license or franchise) to produce this new book.


Really, how creative is it to list words and their uses in someone else's novel? Sounds more like a specialized form of editing to me, like indexing or preparing a glossary for a manuscript. Not exactly original work. Certainly nothing new. The information in the website itself comes from established sources.

I realize I'm arguing against my own forté, nonfiction. But I'm thinking like a fiction writer of a successful enterprise, wanting to keep creative control, as they say in the movie biz.