My husband and I craft wands, we have been since 2004. When we first began, we were selling our wands on eBay. Warner Brothers pulled our products off the sellers list because they claimed exclusive rights on wands and the word "giant." We don't make wands for Harry Potter fans, but that's what they thought we were doing - stomping on their copyright. Copyright for what? A tool that has been around for centuries? An idea that has been around for just as long?

While their treatment of us was less than complimentary, and I did not agree with why they cancled our auctions, I have to side with Rowling, in this case. As an artist, this is her work, not someone else's, to distribute and take money from. These people are acting like authorities on her creation. They're not authorities, and I, as a HUGE fan of the HP Series, wouldn't buy anyone's book about HP, but Rowling's. If they want to be writers in their own right, they should make their own Universe, their own stories, and not feed off of someone else's brilliant work.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Oops, I shouldn't be allowed to say that - Galileo got there first.

Seriously.

You and I may care about authorial intent to the point that we would only want a Rowling creation as our dictionary to her books, and maybe we would prefer that Dickens wrote our commentary on the Pickwick papers - but frankly, I'll take third party commentary and scholarly review, given that Dickens wrote no such commentary. And there are many times when the author has less insight into his own creation than his readers - my bets are that Macbeth, as brilliant as it is, didn't hold all the insights that have been gleaned from it.

If Warner tries to ban the Swiffer because it looks too much like a broom, that's entirely laughable. But I defend tooth and nail the right of parents everywhere to use blankets as Superman cloaks on halloween, and by extension, I defend the right of people everywhere to use their own knowledge, hard work and creativity to produce interesting things related to other people's interesting things and then market them as their own. Wands with fake pheonix feathers? If the people will buy it, it should be legal to make it - as long as you don't falsely claim that Rowling somehow gave you her seal of approval to do so.

You should have taken them to court if you were selling plain old wands.

You have a very good point and more credibility than most based on your own experiences. Well said.

It isn't commentary though. There's no literary analysis going on. It's an encyclopedia.

Seems like you missed the advent of postmodernism. Of course, postmodernists could probably present straight-out piracy as 'commentary' *sigh* But certainly you could take all the words from all the books, and if you reordered them, it would be a new work, possibly a telling commentary. Or just a really bad new book. Using the words to make an encyclopedia is also a new work.