harry potter lexicon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Between seeing We are Wizards at SXSW last month, Elisabeth's excellent Geek Beat column on cosplay and costuming (that's her at the right, dressed as Queen Gorgo), JK Rowling squaring off in court with Steven Vander Ark over this Harry Potter Lexicon, and following the wonderful Twilight fan sites more closely of late, I feel like I've been double-dipped in fandom recently. All this has got me thinking on the concept of fandom and fantasy and what drives people (like myself) to obsess about fictional worlds and characters, and where the line is between healthy love and admiration for books and films and unhealthy obsession.

Don't get me wrong here ... I totally love fansites.. Fans who maintain fansites give hours and hours of their personal time to keeping those sites going, and when sites get popular, they have to recruit other obsessed fans to help them out, all while maintaining the quality of the site and keeping away trolls (and, in the case of Twilight Moms, maybe a few irate spouses to boot!) But how much is too much?

A Harry Potter fan broke down on the stand in court yesterday during the trial for the case brought against him and RDR Books by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling over a published version of a Harry Potter lexicon. According to this AP piece over on Yahoo about the trial, Steven Vander Ark, a devoted (some might say slightly obsessed) fan of the Harry Potter series, got turned onto all-things-Harry while working as a children's librarian at a Christian school; since then, the now 50-year-old fan has devoted countless hours to building and maintaining the online Harry Potter Lexicon, one of the most popular web sites for fans of the series.

Of course, we've all been following this story for a while now. Rowling never took issue with the website, which included lists compiling all the characters, creatures and spells from the massive and hugely successful series. The trouble started when RDR contacted Vander Ark about doing a print version of the Lexicon. Vander Ark was smart enough to get a clause in his contract that specified the publisher would be responsible for legal expenses if they got sued for copyright infringement -- bet he's glad now he thought ahead about that.

One of the most popular Harry Potter websites, the Harry Potter Lexicon, has gotten on the bad side of series author JK Rowling over plans to publish the site as a book. Website ars technica reports that Rowling and Warner Brothers have teamed up to sue the publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon, RDR Books. Steve Vander Ark, the lead publisher of the online Lexicon, wants to publish in book form a compilation of all the materials from the website, but Rowling, who has in the past praised the website and been on friendly terms with Vander Ark, apparently is none-too-pleased about a print version of the material.

Rowling's side of the argument revolves around the point that while she was fine with the Lexicon's online version, because it is freely available and no one is making money off it, a print version crosses the line because there's money involved now. Rowling posted the following on her website on November 9: