The emotional rollercoaster that the Harry Potter court case seems to be in danger of becoming (Shelf Awareness, April 15, 2008), continued when Steven Vander Ark "broke down and cried on the witness stand Tuesday as he faced off in court against his idol J.K. Rowling," according to the Associated Press (via USA Today). Described in the article as stammering and "choking on his words," the man accused of infringing upon Rowling's copyright testified, "It's been . . . It's been . . . It's been difficult because there has been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention. . . . This has been an important part of my life for the last nine years or so."USA Today reported that Vander Ark "acknowledged that he, too, had substantial concerns all along about whether publishing an encyclopedia based on Rowling's Potter universe would constitute copyright infringement. He said he was talked into doing it by the publishing company [RDR Books]."
--- In an editorial entitled "J.K. Rowling may own Harry's world, but we own her words now," yesterday's Times of London (©News Corp.) offered this take on the issue:"A generation has now grown up besotted (©Milton) with Quidditch and Hogwarts. However, it is not astonishing that J.K. Rowling is using a court case to remind the writers of a zany (©Shakespeare) Harry Potter lexicon, now making the jump from cyberspace (©William Gibson) to print, that it is not common property and she did invent it all. She may succeed in persuading the court that her copyright is violated by some parts of the proposed encyclopedia. Indeed, she may have a respectable commercial case, but not much of a cultural one. However, unless she employs a mole (©le Carré) to oversee our every conversation and written exchange, she should not try to suppress a collection of her invented words. For Voldemort, Muggles, Horcruxes and all Rowling's other serendipitous (©Walpole) coinages are ours now; it would be pig-headed (©Jonson) not to let us use them as we wish."English is so full of the neologisms of authors that if we had to credit each one, we would assassinate (©Shakespeare) our prose, and make readers chortle (©Carroll) mightily. Without being didactic (©Milton), Rowling can be assured that she is in good company in contributing words, gratis, to the language. The best she should hope for is that her words become as widely adopted as those of other authors. Perhaps the highest honour has been bestowed on the quark (©Joyce), used as the name for a sub-atomic particle. As there are quarks across the Universe, Joyce may be our most disseminated author. Rowling should be proud if Doxies, Thestrals or Butterbeer make it as far as a lexicon."
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