Tearful Rowling defends Harry in court

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, was near tears when she took the stand in a Manhattan court on Monday to give evidence against one of her greatest fans. Rowling and Warner Bros, the film studio behind the Harry Potter movies, are trying to block the publication of an unauthorised encyclopaedic guide to her seven-book series, written by Steve Vander Ark, a librarian.

Vander Ark, who claims to have read all the Harry Potter books 50 times, apparently caused no problems when he set up an online Harry Potter lexicon – hp-lexicon.com – in 1999. Indeed, there have been reports that Rowling admired the site. But his ambition to turn the online service into a $24.95 book, to be published by a small Michigan company, RDR Books, amounted to "wholesale theft" according to Rowling.

The writer flew to New York from her home in Scotland to argue that the book will interfere with her plan to publish her own Harry Potter encyclopaedia and donate the proceeds to charity. It was Rowling's first time in court, and she had to ask for a glass of water before she was able to explain what Harry Potter meant to her. "I really don't want to cry because I'm British," she said, adding: "It means setting aside my children and everything… The closest I can come is to say to someone, 'How do you feel about your child?'" The author told Judge Robert Patterson that she had stopped work on her current novel because the lawsuit had "decimated my creative work over the last month".

Rowling was dismissive of Vander Ark’s "sloppy, lazy" creation, accusing him of copying her verbatim with a rip-off work that her lawyers claim lifts 2,034 of its 2,437 entries straight from the Harry Potter books. "What particularly galls me is the lack of quotation marks," she said. "If Mr Vander Ark had put quotation marks around everything he had lifted, most of the lexicon would be in quotation marks."

The publisher's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, praised Rowling's creative powers but told the court that the author was seeking to wield a different kind of power to "make the Lexicon disappear in our real world".