While I think it's perfectly acceptable that J.K. Rowling is attempting to stop the publishing of a lexicon based on her work, I also find
this post arguing against Rowling compelling. As the
NY Times pointed out, Rowling encouraged the Lexicon when it was
a not-for-profit website. She simply doesn't want them to publish a
book.
Of course I relate much of this back to the binary of free software v. open source, even if that comparison doesn't strictly apply. There's often the debate between open source supporters and free software supporters regarding authorial control of material. The open source supporters (I'm thinking specifically of
Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD) argue that the GPL asks the authors of code to give up almost all their rights to that code, leaving them with nothing but the social credit of the code. I see their point. While Linus Torvalds might have benefited from the social credit he recieved from GPL-ing the Linux kernel, someone who's worked hard on a piece of code for the X-windows system is unlikely to receive enough social credit to benefit them significantly, even within the community.
Back to the lexicon, though. Ultimately, the writers of the lexicon are sharecroppers (I'm stealing this from
a post by D'Arcy Norman regarding online content. They've built their work on someone else's proprietary intellectual property (Rowling never even open-sourced the code!), and they have no legal right to any of it.
Of course, we're treading on thin ice here, since this means that Rowling's imaginary ideas are her property, which means that George Lucas could sue her for
the structure of her story (and
Joseph Campbell could've sued him). The NBA could sue her for the game of quidditch, which Rowling has openly said was inspired by the basketball games on the television in the pub while she wrote.
I'm being only partly facetious. The Lexicon case is an important one, though. Is fan fiction legitimate only when sanctioned by the author? Should a site like the lexicon be allowed to make money off ad revenue, which seems to be as profitable as a print edition these days? Or should, as the
if:book post points out, authors begin to adapt to the collaborative nature of the web, something that, like it or not,
has always been part of reading and writing?
