Implications
An analysis by Jonathan Band for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the American Library Association (ALA) contends that "the big winner actually was fair use." Band found a number of "pro–fair-use holdings" and concluded that the decision "provides a clear roadmap for how to avoid infringement claims when creating" reference guides to literary works, even when the guides do not contain scholarly criticism or analysis.
Matthew Rimmer, an Australian law expert, commented that the ruling, "is an important precedent in respect of the defense of fair use and it represents a victory of authorial rights over the freedoms of secondary users of copyright works ... The case leaves the way open for future conflict over derivative works, character merchandising and fan fiction based upon the Harry Potter series."
David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project opined that, "there is some good news in the opinion for fair use advocates. First, the court concluded that reference guides such as the Lexicon are transformative in character and in order to fulfill their purpose they must be able to "make considerable use of the original works ... Second, reference works don't lose their transformative nature just because they lack analysis or commentary. The court rejected Rowling's argument that the Lexicon is not transformative because it fails to add these elements ... Third, copyright holders cannot exert exclusive control over the market for reference works. According to Judge Patterson, even a copyright holder as eager as Rowling is to control through licensing all related markets must face limits."
Read more about this topic: Warner Bros. And J. K. Rowling Vs. RDR Books
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)