Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books, 575 F. Supp. 2d 513 (S.D.N.Y. 2008).
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (“WB”) is the exclusive distributor for worldwide distribution of Harry Potter films. RDR Books sought to publish a book “The Lexicon” based on Steven Vanderbilts Ark’s website “The Harry Potter Lexicon.” the website is a popular Harry Potter fan site featuring indexed lists of people, places and things from Harry Potter including fan arts, commentaries, essays, timelines, and etc. The website had received positive feedback from Rowling and her publishers as a reference source. Vander Ark wanted to make a Harry Potter encyclopedia and asked Rowling to collaborate. (Vander Ark was aware of Rowling’s plan to publish a Harry Potter encyclopedia.) Rowling refused and RDR Books approached Vander Ark for publishing his own encyclopedia (The Lexicon). Vander Ark was worried about possible copyright infringement but was persuaded by RDR Book’s confirmation that there will be no legal issues to make a book from the Lexicon website.
Court considered two issues: 1. Whether RDR Books violated WB’s reproduction right; & 2. Whether RDR Books violated WB’s right to produce derivative work.
I. RDR Books did not violate WB’s reproduction right.
Court found that the Lexicon copied a sufficient quantity of the Harry Potter series because it copied expression of Rowling’s imagination and creation and most of the Lexicon’s 2,437 entries contained direct quotations or paraphrases, plot details or summaries of scenes from one or more of the Harry Potter novels. Although this may amount to only a fraction of the 7-book series, the quantum of copying was sufficient to support substantial similarity.
Court also found that sufficient copyrightable quality was copied because the Lexicon’s only source of its content was from the fictional facts created by Rowling and such invented facts constitute creative expression protected by copyright.
RDR Books argued that the order in which fictional facts are presented in the Lexicon was not in such a way to resemble how the story of Harry Potter was created. But the court rejected this argument and held that reproducing original expression in fragments or in a different order, does not preclude a finding of substantial similarity. What is important is how substantial similar the two works are and not how the fictional facts are arranged in the two works. Also, the Lexicon contained direct quotations without quotation marks and close paraphrases which made the languages substantially similar. (“The concept of similarity embraces not only global similarities in structure and sequence, but localized similarity in language.”)
II. RDR Books did not violate WB’s right to produce derivative work.
The court found that although the Lexicon was “based upon” the preexisting works, it wasn’t a work that are “recast, transformed, or adapted” into another medium while still representing the “original work of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. §101. Because the Lexicon did not fall under any example of derivative works listed in the statute and it did not recast the material in another medium to retell the story of Harry Potter but rather gave the copyrighted material another purpose by “condensing, synthesizing, and reorganizing the preexisting material in an A to Z reference guide”, the Lexicon no longer represented the original work of authorship.
Compare this outcome from the New York district court about the right to produce derivative work with a 2nd Circuit case where it found that a Seinfeld trivia book was found to infringe the right to produce derivative work of the copyright owner and producer of Seinfeld.
Law in Style. 