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snorkackcatcherWhat looked like a potentially very useful site -- potterindex.com, which enabled you to search the text of the HP books for words and phrases and told you which page and chapter they were on -- appears to have been shut down, presumably for legal reasons. It now simply gives a message "We regret that we are no longer able to offer the functions of this website."
I can only guess that some clueless IP lawyers regarded it as equivalent to publishing the text of the books, despite the fact that you couldn't actually read the books online or anything. You could only search for phrases, and to get anything useful from the results you already had to have a copy of the books. I'd have thought that would have kept it sufficiently legal -- the site owners appeared to have created a sort of 'inverted file' arrangement which just stored the positions of words and short phrases in the books in their database. You know, exactly the same sort of thing that all the general search engines do? But then again, Google and Yahoo and MSN have lots of money and lawyers and can afford to fight legal battles, and small sites can't even if they have a good case.
It reminds me of the early days of Pottermania (before I even got into HP!) when as I remember the papers were reporting on how WB were training legal big guns on teenage fans who were putting together their own HP resource sites. Back then, it eventually seemed to dawn on someone at Corporate HQ that threatening the most enthusiastic customers for your product in order to prevent them giving you free advertising was a really dumb business strategy.
Sigh. I hope that assessment's wrong and that the problem was merely too much traffic or something. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was what was behind it.
I can only guess that some clueless IP lawyers regarded it as equivalent to publishing the text of the books, despite the fact that you couldn't actually read the books online or anything. You could only search for phrases, and to get anything useful from the results you already had to have a copy of the books. I'd have thought that would have kept it sufficiently legal -- the site owners appeared to have created a sort of 'inverted file' arrangement which just stored the positions of words and short phrases in the books in their database. You know, exactly the same sort of thing that all the general search engines do? But then again, Google and Yahoo and MSN have lots of money and lawyers and can afford to fight legal battles, and small sites can't even if they have a good case.
It reminds me of the early days of Pottermania (before I even got into HP!) when as I remember the papers were reporting on how WB were training legal big guns on teenage fans who were putting together their own HP resource sites. Back then, it eventually seemed to dawn on someone at Corporate HQ that threatening the most enthusiastic customers for your product in order to prevent them giving you free advertising was a really dumb business strategy.
Sigh. I hope that assessment's wrong and that the problem was merely too much traffic or something. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was what was behind it.
