I am a huge fan of Slate. I was dismayed when I saw such misrepresentation of facts in this article.
First, a disclaimer: I am a huge Harry Potter fan, so I am maybe a teensy bit biased.

The HP Lexicon does not offer analysis. Note the difference between this and, say, "MuggleNet.com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7," the authors of which have not been sued. It is, in essence, a re-canned form of Ms. Rowling's books. Rowling is a fan of the website, and uses it in her writing to check for continuity.

"Why, then, would she sue them?" you ask.

The website is a not-for-profit organization. The published book will be bringing in money for Mr. Vaanderark.

And yes, this book may compete with the sales of her planned encyclopedia, the profits of which would be donated to charity.

Also, Mr. Vaanderark's publishing company, RDR books, was also extremely disagreeable, and refused to provide Scholastic with an advance copy of the book.

And ask yourself: if Ms. Rowling was out of profits, would she just have auctioned a book off for approx. 4 million USD, then given the books to charity? I think not.

I missed something here in your arguments. You're saying that copyright should go to the person who is giving the profits to charity. I didn't realize copyright had anything to do with that.

Traditionally in the U.S., anyway, collections of information have not been copyrightable. If you go to a library reference section that still has its old index books you will find book after book, that is exactly what you describe, for newspapers for example. President Nixon was discussed on the following pages, column number x of y newspaper on such and such a date. Third parties index other copyrighted works all the time. Before the internet it was an entire industry. Check the dusty areas of the reference section of your city library; you'll be amazed at all the apparent copyright infringement that's been rampant for 120 years. And those publishers didn't even bother with the latin breakdown or guesses about the meaning of the words they were indexing.

But whatever. All WB wants to do is delay so they can be first, because in the end precedent is not on their side. But with a small publisher it doesn't take a lot of lawyers to scare everybody. Neither side has done themselves any favors in this thing, so as far as I'm concerned they should both lose for stupidity. WB has lost all sight of what a brand means. They'll lose more money on bad feelings than this lexicon ever could have damaged their bottom line.