This has been brewing in the online potter community for the last week or so, and a disappointingly large percentage of the fan community seems to be taking the side of Rowling and company without giving the matter much thought.

Before jumping to conclusions, take a look at the lexicon:

http://www.hp-lexicon.org/

It is not, as so many in the community and across the web have be calling it, a simple reorganization of the text of the books. It is a serious scholarly work that represents significant individual effort on the part of the contributors. It is exactly the kind of "useful art" that copyright law is intended to encourage and fair use is designed protect.

Sadly, what could have been a high-profile test case for fair use has been horribly bungled by the unprofessional and absurd statements of the lexicon's would-be publishers, complaining about fascist laws and justifying their actions as a way to bring the lexicon to children of the third-world. The lexicon has already lost the battle for public opinion, which is unfortunate.

As so often happens, the question that is asked over and over is one of legality. Is publishing this derivative work legal? While it's a somewhat gray area legally, given the current state of copyright enforcement, that particular discussion is a rather pointless exercise. The question that we should really be asking, and the one that is too often forgotten, is not whether the act is legal, but if it should be legal.