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
Fan fiction a creative, transformative process. In 1981, Lucasfilm Ltd. sent out a letter to several fanzine publishers, asserting Lucasfilm's copyright to all "Star Wars" characters and insisting that no fanzine publish pornography. The letter also alluded to possible legal action that could be taken against fanzines that did not comply. The Harry Potter Lexicon is one case where the encyclopedia-like website about everything in the Harry Potter series moved towards publishing and commercializing the Lexicon as a supplementary and complementary source of information to the series. Rowling and her publishers levied a lawsuit against the website creator, Steven Vander Ark, and