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How Harry Potter was Born: A rags to riches copyright story & Quiz


"I was very low, and I had to achieve something.”  

J.K. Rowling 


J.K. Rowling, a single mom with an infant daughter, had reached rock bottom. She was a single mom raising a child alone and living on welfare in the cold winter of Edinburgh, Scotland.  As she later said, "I was very low, and I had to achieve something. Without the challenge, I would have gone stark raving mad."

This is the true story of J.K. Rowling, the author of the famous Harry Potter books, and how her dream to support herself and her child by writing books turned into reality.  During her daughter’s naps, she simply sat at a table in a local coffee shop, and began to write the stories that became world famous as books, movies, computer games, music, and more.

J.K. Rowling is now one of the most famous authors in the world, who can take care of her family beyond her wildest dreams.  But imagine how crushed she would have been, if someone had taken her book after she wrote it in the coffee shop, and had printed it themselves without paying her any money, or had arranged for a movie to be made from the book, or arranged for computer games and music to be created based on the book, and had not given J.K. Rowling a penny!

The reason that did not happen is a law called “copyright law.” It’s a powerful law that protects creativity.  It can change lives like it changed J.K. Rowling’s life, and the lives of everyone who loves her books.  It’s Copyright Power!

(For more information on J.K. Rowling and her books, you can go to the web site of her publisher, Scholastic Books:  http://www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/author/).



Creativity is Hard Work!

Everyone is creative, everyone has dreams and ideas, the ability to tell a story or hum a tune or draw a picture.  What makes some people different is that they decide that they want to go a step further: they do the hard work of writing down the story, or writing down the music for a song, or recording the song, or buying paint and making the painting.  They want to share their creative gift and vision with the world, and they want to paid for doing a good job, just like everyone else.  Earning money from creativity means you can keep going, create more, and share with the world.

Imagine if J.K. Rowling had only told the Harry Potter stories to her daughter, and never gone to the tremendous effort of writing them down, sitting in that coffee shop filling page after page, getting writer’s cramp and trying to wash the ink off her fingers.  Copyright law helps hard working creative people earn money, whether it amounts to a few dollars, or even millions of dollars, whether one person likes their work, or many millions.


Copyright Power!

Copyright law gave J.K. Rowling copyright power!  It says that she alone has the right to decide who can make copies of her book, who can turn her book into a movie, or a computer game, or a song.  This is a great power for an author, and J.K. had the power to decide who could do those things, and how much money they would have to pay her.

Now she needed a publisher, a company that would turn her story into a book, print copies, and advertise, sell the books, then send her some of the money.  Publishers come in lots of different forms.  They are called a publisher when they create books and magazines, or a record company when they create CDs and music videos, or a movie or TV company when they make movies and TV shows, or a software company when they make software and games.  But all of them are really “publishers:” they take creative work by people like J.K. Rowling and find a way to sell it.  But a publisher can’t do anything until the author agrees to let them.  When a publisher sends money to an author, it’s called a “royalty” payment.  Copyright power means that books can be sold, and royalties earned for the author, even when the author is sleeping or on vacation.  That’s copyright power!


Authors need their royalties!


Unfortunately, there are lots of ways to cheat J.K. and her daughter out of the royalties she worked so hard to receive.  If there is a song based on her book, people could rip a copy of the song into an MP3 file and send the file to everyone else on the internet for free.  Or if there is a Harry Potter software game, she is being cheated every time someone puts the software files on the web and sends them to others.  Or if someone puts copies of her books  on line for free, she is cheated every time someone downloads those files.  It’s not just the publisher who is losing money: J.K. and people like her are also losing their royalty income.  Making or downloading copies that you did not pay for means you infringe the rights of authors like J.K.  Copyright infringement is just a fancy word for cheating by getting something for free that should be paid for.


Copyright infringer!


Most copyright infringers are not truly thieves.  They don’t even fully realize or understand that what they are doing is wrong.  They especially don’t understand who they are hurting, that it is real people like J.K. Rowling that are hurt when copies are made without the permission of the copyright owner.  The problem is it’s incredibly easy to infringe copyright on the internet:  One easy click is all it takes to download or send a copy of a song or movie file or software game that wasn’t paid for.  But it cheats authors and musicians, people like J.K. Rowling.  It also hurts people who work for publishers and may lose their jobs if people stop buying books and CDs and software.  Remember that publishers pay lots of royalties to lots of authors who need the money.  Even the super successful people like J.K. deserve their success, and deserve their royalties.


A Whole Lotta Rights!

We live in a high-tech multi media world.  A copyright owner, someone like J.K. Rowling or her publisher, may have rights that you would be surprised to learn existed:

The right to make and distribute copies, for example printing copies of books and making copies of CDs, DVDs, videos.  

The right to let someone else use her story:  J.K. Rowling had the right to decide what other uses could be made of her Harry Potter story, for example making a movie, or a computer game.  J.K. would let other people derive their rights from her copyright, so these are called “derivative rights.”

The right of public performance of music, dramas, and dance:  Most people do not know that the copyright owner of a song has the right to be paid whenever their music is performed in public, for example in a concert hall, or even on radio, television, and the Internet.   And if Harry Potter ever becomes a Broadway show, J.K. has a right to be paid for those public performances on stage. That’s copyright power!

The right to display:  If J.K. lets someone create Harry Potter artwork including posters, she has the right to control how those images are used.  She could be paid a royalty if the image is used on a book cover, or on the Internet.

The right to perform sound recordings on the Internet:  This is a new right of the Internet era.  Record companies and musicians can receive a royalty if someone plays their CD on the Internet.  If the CD is the Harry Potter soundtrack, perhaps J.K. will get a share of this royalty too!

Snippets, bits, portions, samples, odds and ends: "Fair Use"

Sometimes there are situations where it may be OK to use just a snippet of someone’s work without asking first.  For example a newspaper review might quote some passages from a Harry Potter book, or a teacher might use one page only out of the entire book as a writing sample, or a church might perform some copyrighted music during a religious service, or a school might perform a school band concert for the community, with any small admission charge used only for educational fund raising activities.  Or a TV news program might show a brief excerpt from a Harry Potter movie as part of news reporting.  These examples and others are fair to authors like J.K. Rowling, because they do not cheat authors out of royalties.  They are called “fair use.”

Fair use has limits though.  Generally, fair uses will respect an author’s rights and will not replace a genuine sale.  If you are making a copy without permission, and the result would be one less copy of the book or CD being sold, it’s not fair to J.K.!




Keywords Quiz & Discussion Points:

What's creativity?

What’s an author?

Why do they have Copyright Power?

What’s a publisher?

What’s are author’s royalties?

What’s a copyright infringement?

Why does a copyright infringement hurt authors?

What types of rights are included in Copyright Power?

What’s a fair use?