We’ve ranted before and we are going to rant again, especially after this just came over the wire:

A judge says “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling has won her claim that a fan violated her copyright with his plans to publish a Potter encyclopedia.

Judge Robert Patterson said in a ruling Monday that Rowling had proven that Steven Vander Ark’s “Harry Potter Lexicon” would cause her irreparable harm as a writer. Vander Ark runs the popular Harry Potter Lexicon Web site.

J.K. Rowling is sued…SUED…the folks who run the Harry Potter Lexicon because they announced plans to publish a book defining all the wizarding terms used in JK’s staggeringly successful book series.

What follows comes from Potter fans (Yeah, we pissed ourselves waiting in line for Book 7, now anger clouds the mind as a wise Jedi once told us). We’re pissed because this lawsuit treads on a few things we consider the rights of fans while also exposing minor hypocrisy on Rowling’s side.

In April when this suit was big, JK was in New York to testify against the owners of the Harry Potter Lexicon site, who plan to release a Harry Potter encyclopedia that Rowling said was “wholesale theft” of her 20 years of work.

At the hearing, when asked how she felt about Harry Potter, she got choked up and asked for a glass of water before replying: “I really don’t want to cry because I’m British. It means setting aside my children and everything. These characters meant so much to me, and continue to mean so much to me, over such a long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand. The closest I can come is to say to someone, ‘How do you feel about your child?’”

Oooooohkay.

This is bullshit, because there are countless books out there that take JK Rowling’s fantastic stories and expand upon them. There’s The Book of Harry Potter Trifles, Trivias, and Particularities by Racheline Maltese, The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter : A Treasury of Myths, Legends, and Fascinating Facts by David Colbert, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the World of Harry Potter by Tere Stouffer, The Seeker’s Guide to Harry Potter by Geo Trevarthen, and the Field Guide to Harry Potter by Colin Duriez.

Those are just a few of the books that are only Harry Potter references, we left off the dozens of books arguing for or against Christianity and Potter co-existing, the numerous books about mythology and philosophy in the Potter series and the other web-based book by the guys who do Pottercast that contained only theories about how the last book would end.

So why would Rowling take a stand on the Lexicon? Because she had announced that the only new Harry Potter project she would consider doing (this was before the Beetle Bard books were actually going to be reproduced) is an encyclopedia of Potter that would not only cover the books, but some of the ancillary characters and mythical creatures.

The official reference would probably be sold for charity like her Quiddich History and guide to Magical Creatures, so it’s not about money (of which she has quite enough).

As Potter Fans, we know that anyone rabid enough to buy a fan-made encyclopedia (written by folks who spent years of their life tracking all things Potter) are just crazy enough to buy multiple copies of the official one.

Is anyone going to buy the unofficial lexicon then ditch one that was actually written by THE CREATOR? No.

Picking on one internet book while so many other texts actually seek to distort the message of your books seems foolish and somehow based on greed.

We can’t put our fingers on that greed part without a full-list of Potter books published outside of Scholastic…

Accio list!

That didn’t work.