Steven Vander Ark wants to bring his Harry Potter Lexicon website to print. Is he violating J.K. Rowling’s intellectual property rights – or merely exercising his rights under the Fair Use doctrine?

The three-day trial that pitted Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and her publisher Warner Brothers against super fan Steven Vander Ark and RDR Books, the little-known publisher of the proposed Harry Potter Lexicon, has come to an end. But the debate on the copyright issues that have ensued goes on. Here’s how it started…

Once upon a time, Harry Potter fanatic Vander Ark started cataloguing the J.K. Rowling series’ spells, characters and creatures – becoming a hit among fellow fans, interview subject, convention speaker, Warner bros. invitee, and even a Rowling acquaintance (she gave his Harry Potter Lexicon site an award). Then, by deciding to release a print version of the lexicon – and morphing from Rowling fan to Rowling competitor – everything changed. And lawyers sprang into action. Rowling and Warner Bros. sued for copyright infringement, seeking to block publication on the grounds that it violated copyright law. It may be very hard for US District Judge Robert Patterson, Jr., who will decide the case, to come to a decision soon.

U.S. copyright law allows, on a limited basis, excerpting of an author’s work by teachers, academics, journalists and critics. Is the Harry Potter Lexicon academic enough? During the trial dueling experts weighed in on the guide's potential worth to both fans and academics. A dean of English saw Rowling’s novels as a rich topic for academic research and Vander Ark’s lexicon as an unscholarly approach to the subject. But another literature professor testified that reference guides just like Vander Ark’s lexicon could help readers understand jargon-heavy fantasy novels.

US rules allow, with limits, the "fair use" of copyrighted material in unauthorized works. Journalists writing a review may quote from films and books. Scholars writing an author’s biography can use excerpts from the author’s novels. The legality of this practice depends on how much material was taken and how similar/different the new work s from the original. Does Vander Ark’s lexicon pass this test? While readers’ guides are legal, an A-Z list of characters and place names, their origins in folklore and their part in the plots may be just too much material taken from Rowling and experts say that drawing the line won’t be easy.

How does copyright law work on Web-to-print material? The Harry Potter copyright dispute illustrates the murky state of copyright law enforcement on the Web, where people can do things they would never do in print, like copy sections of books, music and movies and manipulate them into new material that they can post as their own. But while brand owners have mostly let the many offenders slide – and even Rowling has encouraged people to write new stories for her characters – it suddenly became a copyright issue when Vander Ark decided to sell and profit from his lexicon. It just happens that Rowlings is planning to write her own Potter encyclopedia which would be competing directly with his.

So, is the publication of Vander Ark’s lexicon a ‘wholesale theft” of nearly 20 years of hard work by J.K. Rowling? Or, as RDR’s lawyer put it, is the lexicon merely a reference guide, a legitimate effort to organize the complex world of Harry Potter – one completely sanctioned as fair use allowed by law for reference books? Is the trial about pure plagiarism on Vander Ark’s part – or too much control by an author over books about her or her work? Will the “floodgates open” and clear the way for  other rip-offs of original work, as Rowling warned – or can the two books co-exist with the latter providing “a significant amount of original analysis and commentary concerning everything from insights into the personality of key characters, relationships among them, the meaning of various historical and literary allusions…” as RDR Books suggests.

Judge Patterson has urged both parties to come up with a creative settlement that will satisfy them both. But experts are not optimistic.