What Ms Rowling is asking for may not be entirely legal or fair with reference to the RDR case; to my mind she’s really stretching copyright protection. That being said, I think that this case could go either way both on facts and on law.
I don’t see copyright as a moral right at all — I see it as a legal right which has some moral rights attached to it viz. those of integrity and paternity and, in this instance, neither of those moral rights appear to have been violated.
Somehow, I suspect that this case needs to be turned into an emotive issue for her to win: I’m pretty certain that that’s why she’s gone on the stand calling her books her children although, if I’m to be honest, I’d have to admit that my lack of sympathy could have something to do with the fact that I’m not a huge fan of extending copyright protection beyond a point or, for that matter, of Harry Potter.
The books somehow didn’t strike much of a chord with me; I identify with Harold Bloom’s description of reading Harry Potter:
“I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character “stretched his legs.” I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.†[1]
Also, if it comes down to derivation, Ms Rowling’s books are pretty much a patchwork of older stories involving magic. As A.S. Byatt put it:
“Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing “secondary worlds.†Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from “Star Wars†to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.
…
But in the case of the great children’s writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper’s teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.
Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin’s wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling’s magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.†[2]
I’m unconvinced that Ms Rowling has the right she’s claimed or that less well known authors would benefit by her being able to ‘protect’ her work in this way.
Links:
[1] boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers
[2] A.S. Byatt, ‘Harry Potter and the Childish Adult’, New York Times, 7 July 2003 (subscription needed) through ‘The Legal Soapbox’