Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. and J. K. Rowling v. RDR Books, 575 F.Supp.2d 513 (SDNY 2008) is a copyright lawsuit brought on 31 October 2007 by the media company Warner Bros. and "Harry Potter" author J. K. Rowling against RDR Books, an independent publishing company based in Muskegon, Michigan. Lawyers for Rowling and Time Warner argued that RDR's attempt to publish for profit a print facsimile of "The Harry Potter Lexicon", a free online guide to the "Harry Potter" fictional universe, constituted an infringement of their copyright and was not protected by the
Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series Since first coming to wide notice in the late 1990s, the "Harry Potter" book series by J. K. Rowling has engendered a number of legal disputes. Rowling, her various publishers and Time Warner, the owner of the rights to the "Harry Potter" films, have taken numerous legal actions to protect their copyrights, and also have fielded accusations of copyright theft themselves. The worldwide popularity of the "Harry Potter" series has led to the appearance of a number of locally produced, unauthorised sequels and other derivative works, sparking efforts to ban or contain them.