cleolinda | Tortellini is rumored for dinner (Reply)

Sweet Lord, today has been a little bit crazy. I didn't expect that we'd get quite so many testimony leaks so quickly from the trial, because obviously I have never been on the internets before. JK Rowling testified today, and here are, essentially, the highlights (specific citations are at the FW entry, which I'm still updating):

ETA: Apparently the JKR quotes have come off as vindictive out of context. All I'm saying is, if you've read the Justia documents... you can see where she's coming from. If nothing else, keep in mind that they're just that--out of context. I imagine that Leaky will have a fuller report later.

Justia: The pie chart of DOOM.

NYT: "The lead plaintiff lawyer apologized for saying the name of the villain Lord Voldemort out loud. Albus Dumbledore was quoted in opening arguments for his admonition of when you must 'choose between what is right and what is easy.' "

MSNBC: "J.K. Rowling says her efforts to halt a publisher's 'Harry Potter' lexicon have been crushing her creativity. Rowling says she has stopped work on a new novel. She says her federal court case has 'decimated my creative work over the last month'.... She told the court on Monday: 'This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.' "

WSJ: " 'This trial has decimated my creative work over the last month,' said Rowling. 'You lose the [plot] threads and worry whether you’ll be able to pick them up again.... Should my fans be flooded with a surfeit of substandard books — so called lexicons — I’m not sure I’d have the will or heart to continue,' said Rowling, who went on to characterize the H.P. Lexicon as 'sloppy,' 'lazy,' and 'incorrect.' "

NYT: "It was clearly an emotional issue for Ms. Rowling, who had flown in from Scotland to testify. She was given a box of blue tissues after she said, 'I really don’t want to cry because I’m British.' "

Bloomberg: " 'Should it be published, I feel that carte blanche will be given to anybody who wants to make a quick bit of money,' Rowling said. 'The idea of my readership parting with their or their parents hard-earned cash for this is a travesty.' " Also: " 'What particularly galls is the lack of quotation marks,' Rowling testified. 'If Mr. Vander Ark had put quotations marks around everything he lifted, most of the lexicon would be in quotation marks.' "

NYT: "Rather, she said she was opposed to how the 'Lexicon' copied many phrases word-for-word from her book without adding meaningful additional context, adding that some of the work was sloppy or wrong. 'Alohomora,' a spell that opens doors in Harry Potter’s word, does not come from 'aloha,' the Hawaiian salutation, she said on the stand. Rather it derives from a West African term meaning favorable to thieves, she said."

WSJ: "Cendali then took Rowling through a series of comparisons between, on the one hand, Rowling’s novels and her two companion books and, on the other hand, the Lexicon. On a big screen, the plaintiffs positioned passages about 'the order of the Phoenix,' 'chinese fireballs' and 'Florean Fortescue’s ice cream parlor' next to Vander Ark’s entries on those items in the H.P. Lexicon to show that they’d been taken almost verbatim."

NYT: "When asked to discuss the similarity of the Lexicon’s definition of Chinese fireballs on the stand with her own writing, she said that it was not like a giraffe, where if she and Mr. Vander Ark were describing the animal, they might inevitably use the same words. 'It’s not as if we are describing something that exists outside my imagination,' she said."

NYT: "Occasionally, the muggle world would come in focus. When the lawyer apologized for struggling with the pronunciation of 'occamy' (a creature resembling a winged snake that was a play off of Occam’s Razor), Ms. Rowling said: 'You can pronounce it any way you want. It is not a real thing.'

WSJ: "But when Hammer tried to get Rowling to concede that the H.P. Lexicon is more comprehensive — in that it’s longer — than other books, she shot back: 'Is that the best you can say for the Lexicon? That it has text?' She added, 'An alphabetical rearrangement is the easiest and laziest way to re-sell my work.' "

By the way, y'all may want to fan out and watch the various late night shows tonight--given that the Lexicon case has already turned up in Conan's monologue, God knows what'll happen now that the news is actually covering it.

Meanwhile, the linkspam I have on hand, because I've still got 200 unread comment notifications in my inbox, and the FW comments are where the links come from in the first place: