One might think Harry Potter's biggest fans would be thrilled that a Potter movie is opening
this fall, but instead, they're organizing a worldwide boycott of merchandise featuring the
fictional boy wizard. The reason: Lawyers from Warner Bros., a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner,
which purchased the rights to the Harry Potter trademarks and copyrights for the film, have been
sending letters threatening legal action over copyright violations to kids who have created fan
Web sites. "It really got me mad," says Heather Lawver, 16, of Reston, Va., a site creator and
boycott organizer. One girl, Lawver says, "was afraid these lawyers would come banging down her
door and take away all her family's money. "I was like, 'OK, this has got to stop, now!' I've
never liked seeing kids getting bullied."
So she and Alastair Alexander, 33, of London, have launched the Defense Against the Dark Arts
project (www.potterwar.org.uk) to fight for fans around the world. "We're a voice for them,
because most of the kids were too afraid to do anything," Lawver says.
This is the latest skirmish in the ongoing battle over copyright and trademark on the Web,
and companies seem increasingly willing to sue for any perceived infringements.
Not only have for-profit cybersquatters been targeted, but so have fans creating online
tributes to such pop culture icons as The Simpsons, Star Trek and The X-Files.
The letters say Warner Bros. wants Potteresque Web addresses turned over because they are
"likely to cause consumer confusion or dilution of the intellectual property rights."
"It caused considerable alarm here, I can tell you," says Alan McCaw of Taunton, England,
whose 13-year-old son got one of the letters three days after posting a Potter fan page.
"Their concern was that we would make money from the site or there would be pornography on
it. But they fired off this letter without looking at the site," McCaw says. "It was obviously
a fan site, nobody making money. It was just kids who loved Harry Potter."
The letters have driven young fans to remove many fan pages, including
www.harrypotterfan.co.uk and www.harrypotterfaq.com.
After her friends were threatened, Lawver, the creator of a site called www.dprophet.com
(named for The Daily Prophet, a magical newspaper in the Potter books), says she had had enough
and decided to organize the boycott.
Pamela Samuelson, an intellectual-property expert at the University of California-Berkeley,
says such "expressive uses of trademark" are generally beyond the scope of the owner to control;
even anti-cybersquatting laws protect only against bad-faith, for-profit registrations of
trademarked domains.
"Our intention was never to harass fans," says Warner Bros.' Diane Nelson, who adds that
letters are no longer going out en masse. "The tone of the letters did not take into account
that Harry Potter is unique, and many of the recipients were innocent, young fans," she says.
"We would encourage anyone who believes they received it erroneously to contact us."
But Lawver isn't satisfied.
"They've scared the living daylights out of these kids," she says. "What are they going to
do to apologize?"
Related Stories:
More info available at www.dprophet.com/dada/.
Also, read the Boycott Harry Potter Manifesto at
www.dprophet.com/dada/manifesto.html.