When you’re richer than the Queen, you’re bound to attract some money-hunting crazies. J.K. Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury  are rejecting “unfounded, unsubstantiated, and untrue” plagiarism claims from the estate of author Adrian Jacobs, which has filed a lawsuit accusing Rowling of borrowing ideas for her Harry Potter series.

The lawsuit claims that the fourth novel in Rowling’s series (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) copied elements from Jacobs’ 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard – No. 1 Livid Land. According to the suit, some of these similar elements include a wizard competition and wizards using trains as a mode of transportation. From the CBC:

“Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest, which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures,” the suit says.

In its defense, Bloomsbury described Jacobs’ book as “a very insubstantial booklet running 36 pages, which had a very limited distribution. The central character of Willy The Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school.” A statement released yesterday also added that Rowling “had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy The Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004, almost seven years after the publication of the first book in the highly publicized Harry Potter series.”

You’ve got to hand it to Steven Vander Ark: the guy’s got chutzpah. In September, a Manhattan judge ruled against Vander Ark in a lawsuit launched by mega-selling author J.K. Rowling over a proposed Harry Potter encyclopedia, which Vander Ark was set to publish. The encyclopedia was a print version of the author’s … er … encyclopedic fan website. The judge in the case ruled that publication of the book would do irreparable harm to Rowling as a writer (read: it might cost her money in lost earnings). The book was permanently blocked from publication, and the judge awarded Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment $6,750 in statutory damages, which is probably the amount that Rowling lays down for lunch these days.

It appears, however, that Vander Ark is uncowed. Notwithstanding the September court ruling, the CBC is now reporting that plans to publish the encylcopedia, albeit in a modified form, are going ahead. The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials will appear on January 12, 2009. The book is to be published by RDR Books.

“We learned a lot at the trial about what was acceptable, what would follow the fair use guidelines,” said the 50-year-old Vander Ark, a former school librarian.

“That was not clear before. There was no law on the books that made it clear what was acceptable and what wasn’t,” he added, saying he spent five or six months revising his book – originally slated for release in November 2007.

“Coming out of the trial, I had a much better idea of what should go into the book.”

One can safely assume that Vander Ark is not referring to stills of Daniel Radcliffe’s full-frontal nudity in the recent Broadway production of Equus – this probably stretches the definition of “related materials” – but the only indication of what the revised volume might contain comes from RDR publisher Roger Rapoport, who is quoted  as saying the new version features “a lot more critical commentary, which means more analysis.”

No word yet as to whether Rowling, who once upon a time praised Vander Ark’s site for its comprehensiveness, will take further legal action, or whether she’ll just go ahead and unleash the Dementors on his ass.

• Patrick Ness’s first book for children, The Knife of Never Letting Go, wins the Booktrust teenage prize
• Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight causes a tourism boom in Forks, Washington
• Is Obama Book Club the newest craze?
• A mother sues her judge daughter for the daughter’s claims of childhood abuse in her memoir, Ugly
• Massachusetts-based author founds a “Robin-Hood style publishing model” with non-profit publishing house Concord Free Press

Google will pay $125-million to settle a class-action lawsuit with The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over its book-scanning project.

As part of the agreement, Google will expand its Book Search program to include online access to copyrighted books, out-of-print books, and materials from major U.S. libraries. It will also create a Book Rights Registry to compensate authors and publishers for material accessed online.

From the Google blog:

What makes this settlement so powerful is that in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them. And when people read them, authors and publishers of in-copyright works will be compensated. If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn’t exist before.

The Authors Guild and five members of the AAP sued Google in 2005 for using its “technology and clout” for massive-scale copyright infringement.

A fight between two high-school cheerleaders has resulted in an American court ruling that print-on-demand services are not liable in defamation lawsuits. (Sounds like a plot twist on Gossip Girl…)

The two cheerleaders, Ms. Calcagni and Ms. Sandler, battled over a boy they both liked and Calcagni allegedly spray-painted hateful graffiti near Sandler’s home. After she was convicted of a hate crime, Calcagni’s family hired a freelance writer to tell their side of the story, which they published using Amazon.com’s BookSurge print-on-demand service, a kind of 21st-century version of a vanity press. Sandler’s family sued BookSurge for defamation, but the suit was thrown out when BookSurge was deemed to have had “negligible involvement” with the authors of the book. MediaShift reports:

Traditionally, book publishers could be held liable for defamatory statements in their books under the theory that they exercised some form of control over the books’ contents. But online print-on-demand companies typically provide printing and distribution services only, and do not perform the traditional editing, fact-checking and marketing functions associated with other publishers. Sandler v. Calcagni appears to be the first case in which someone has argued that a print-on-demand company should face traditional “publisher” liability.

The court decided that BookSurge had no editorial input into the book’s contents, and therefore could not be held responsible for anything libellous or defamatory. It was found that the service acted more as a mass copier than a publisher, which would imply more active involvement with the process of preparing the book for press.

There won’t be an appeal, since the two parties subsequently settled their differences out of court.

Which leads Quillblog to wonder, why all this acrimony? Calcagni and Sandler are cheerleaders: couldn’t they just settle their differences in the good ol’ fashioned Hollywood manner, with a cheerleading competition? Bring it on!

Harry Potter really is the boy who lived – on and on, in lawsuits pitting J.K. Rowling against a now former fan.

In the latest Rowling-related news, a federal judge blocked publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, citing that it would cause Rowling “irreparable injury” as a writer.

Steven Vander Ark, who operates the Harry Potter Lexicon website, planned to publish the reference guide through Michigan publishing house RDR Books. In 2007, Rowling sued RDR to halt publication of the Lexicon through Vander Ark’s website. Rowling and her publisher were awarded $6,750 in statutory damages.

While the HP Lexicon may be blocked, Vander Ark is already planning his next project — a memoir entitled In Search of Harry Potter, which will chronicle his travels to locations similar to those described in Rowling’s novels. No word on whether he will travel via Floo network or Nimbus 2000.

Seems there’s a bit of controversy brewing around Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, which was published a few months back by Knopf Canada. (Read Q&Q’s review here.) According to the CBC, the real-life cellist Vedran Smailovic, who served as the inspiration for the book’s title character, is now demanding compensation for it, claiming that Galloway never contacted him to seek permission to be included in the novel.

With a stool and his cello, Smailovic once played on top of the rubble from a deadly mortar attack in Sarajevo. In plain view of snipers, he played for 22 days straight — one day for each person killed during the mortar attack.

So does the character in Steven Galloway’s book, published this year. It’s a war tale woven around three characters in Sarajevo and their reaction to a cellist character inspired by Smailovic, whose story has travelled around the globe.

[...]

Smailovic said that if people are making money off tales from his past, he is entitled to a share of it.

“They put my picture, my face, on the front, on the cover with no permission. They don’t ask me — they use my name advertising their product. I don’t care about fiction, I care about reality.”

Whichever way you look at it, this is a pretty sticky situation with no clear-cut answers. It’s hard not to sympathize with Smailovic, but based on the info in the CBC piece, it sounds as if Galloway only ever meant to pay homage to the man, and that he did so in a fairly respectful fashion. The Smailovic character is prominently featured only in the first five pages of the book, he never speaks, and he is mostly used as a thematic device to link the other three characters. Galloway even sent Smailovic an autographed copy of the book, which suggests that he expected Smailovic would like it.

Our guess is that Smailovic probably doesn’t have a very good understanding of how the publishing business works, and is under a false impression that there are Hollywood-style profits coming Galloway’s way. And we kind of wonder if maybe the CBC doesn’t have the best understanding of publishing either, as the piece implies at one point that Galloway should (or could) have offered compensation to Smailovic or the other 25 people he interviewed in researching the book. First of all, it was just background research for a work of fiction, not non-fiction, and second, the CBC would presumably be much more outraged if they discovered Galloway had paid people for the stories, which is one of the age-old ethical taboos of journalism.

As for Smailovic’s concern about being put on the book’s cover, he has more of a case there, but even that is not so cut-and-dried. The cover (which you can see here) is indeed a photo of him, but it’s oriented so that his face and most of his body are cut from the image, as if the cameraman was wandering away from the nominal subject to take in the devastated surroundings instead. In fact, it could be argued that the cover is attempting to show, in visual terms, that the cellist is not the book’s real subject at all, which only helps Galloway’s case.

Microsoft is abandoning its Live Book Search venture after withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitization project. The company announced Friday that it will shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic websites and stop scanning library and copyright books, instead relying on other library and digitization partners for book content.

Microsoft had scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles to date – that material will still be available in search results, but not through separate indexes.

Columnist Andrew Orlowski of U.K. tech website The Register suggests that Microsoft is “effectively handing the future of the book to Google,” which, unlike the Open Content Alliance, doesn’t ask for permission from copyright holders before scanning content.

He writes:

For this, the ad giant has received lawsuits in the U.S. and France from authors and publishers. Google has fought back using sock puppets of its own. Stanford Law School’s anti-copyright centre has been helping out the Google cause – and received a $2M thank you in return.

[…]

Yet the policy will be brutally effective, with Google holding a monopoly on the printed word in book form.

Microsoft says it will donate the books digitised by Live Book Search to the copyright holders. Meanwhile, Google will surely never see a monopoly fall into its lap quite so easily. The future of digital books is now entirely in its hands.

Meanwhile, Nate Anderson of the Ars Technica technology website posits that the end of Live Book Search might actually be a good thing for the future of books:

The loss of resources is “significant,” [Open Content Alliance member Brewster Kahle] tells Ars, but “if we can’t pick it up from here,” then the OCA deserves to falter. Microsoft and other corporations like Yahoo have gotten the project off the ground by providing the initial scanning stations and developing the expertise needed to do the project right. While Microsoft is taking its cash with it, the company is leaving in place all the equipment that it paid for and is releasing all scans of public domain works for any use, not just education and research. According to Kahle, Microsoft has done more than it is contractually obligated to do as it ramps down its involvement with OCA.

In a way, Kahle sees the retreat of the corporations from OCA as a necessary step, perhaps even a good one. He’s a firm believer in the idea that corporations should not be the entities we trust to provide access to important cultural data stores. If people think that corporations are the right way to access the history of human discourse, Kahle says they’re in for “a series of very rude shocks.” (The University of Michigan, which has thrown in its lot with Google, does not agree.)

The New York Times confirms a story that appeared on Radaronline.com earlier this week that “James Frey, the author who admitted making up portions of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and his publisher, Random House, have agreed in principle on a settlement with readers who filed lawsuits claiming they had been defrauded.”

The Times relies on an anonymous source for details of the settlement because it has yet to be approved by a judge, but states that “consumers who bought the book on or before Jan. 26 – when both the publisher and author released statements acknowledging that Mr. Frey had altered certain facts – will be eligible for a full refund.” If you didn’t keep your receipt, the publisher will accept some other proofs of purchase such as a particular page of the hardcover novel or the paperback’s front cover.

Quillblog prefers the more creative terms set out in a mock memo from Random House on Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog. The memo promises a refund of $4.24 for anyone returning the dust jacket with a hand-drawn moustache on the author’s photo, and a special offer: “If you send us a videotape, a VCD, or a DVD, in which you can demonstrate that you led or coerced a group of people to throw at least 200 copies into a public bonfire, we would like to offer you a promising career here at Random House.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The New York Times
Click here for Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant blog

Radar Online is reporting that Random House U.S. is looking to settle the various class-action lawsuits brought against it by readers of James Frey’s notoriously fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces who claim they were victims of fraud.

As part of the settlement, Random House (which has not confirmed any of the details of the story) will offer a full refund to all who bought the book before it was officially announced to contain many, mmm, embellishments. The catch: you need your original sales receipt to claim the money, so unless you’ve been using it as a bookmark, tough luck.

Another unconfirmed rumour has it that Random House is planning to send an English professor to the home of every enraged reader of Frey’s tome to explain the meaning of the expression “caveat lector.”

Related links:
Read the Radar Online story here