Hm. I'll agree the publishing house is greedy; they approached him, however. SVA seems more opportunistic in my eyes... It's ethically grey; I've had to fight tooth and nail and become something of a copyright geek to argue down flinchy press editors to let me quote earlier drafts of Hemingway's sentences. (I've literally counted the # of words that were changed between versions and the number of "new" words total included in entire essays when arguing with various presses.) I try to imagine what I'd think if I were approached by a publishing house saying "We'd like to publish that thing you have on the web; it counts as scholarly and thus doesn't violate copyright" "You sure?" "Yep, our legal team is so sure of that we'll put that 'we pay fees' in your contract" - especially if I didn't have any experience in scholarly publishing. I don't know. I might trust them.

Which would be stupid of me.

And I'd be hoping to make money on the project, so I suppose that'd be greedy of me.

That said - it also seems that JKR is doing her level best to be absolutely clear what her objections are here. I can't see her silencing writers because of a slimeball publishing house trying to print a lexicon. She likes her fan writers. She's argued with Warner Bros. about that. "Let them write - it's creative."

So I'm being optimistic.

I'm also pretty sure the publishing house will lose. If press editors are so flinchy they don't want me quoting the omitted words "There must be some actual world" to compare it with the published words "They were all waiting reasonably" in the service of a scholarly argument, copyright law is strongly in favor of protecting the "original author" and not the "upstart scholar" - so I have faith.

Re: the Anne Rice route: *shudders* I think she's a loon.

All hail JKR.

I just can't unilaterally condemn SVA because it's too easy for me to see how easily he was probably convinced - by supposed experts - that his work doesn't violate copyright at all.

It'll be interesting to see how it unfolds.