Now that you’re done with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Go read an alternate storyline — Harry Potter and the Showdown. Apparently people have been hard at work in China cranking out stories to meet the voracious demand from readers. Some even think that these stories could be better than the ones written by Rowling herself!
Some homegrown “Harry Potter” authors are also unabashed about their forays into publishing.
One such writer is a manager at a Shanghai textile factory named Li Jingsheng. “I bought Harry Potter 1 through 6 for my son a couple of years ago, and when he finished reading them, he kept asking me to tell him what happens next,” he explained. “We couldn’t wait, so I began making up my own story and in May last year, I typed it up on my computer. I had to get up early and go to bed late to write this novel, usually spending one hour, from 6 to 7 in the morning and 10 to 11 in the evening to write it.”
The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.
“This is fantastic,” Gu Guaiguai, an admiring reader, wrote online about “Showdown.” “I wonder if Rowling would bother to continue to write if she had read it.”
Another reader was even more breathless. “You are the pride of our Harry Potter fans,” he wrote, adding, “We expect you to go on and write Harry Potter number eight,” which Mr. Li has in fact already begun.
on August 2nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Well, it’s been a day and I thought that I should explicitly point out that since these people are violating copyright laws themselves, they have no way to “protect” THEIR “original” work. Despite this, entire novels are being written.
Cool huh?
on August 2nd, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Yes, but, but-for the existence of copyright laws in the first place that resulted in an incentive to produce the original work that these authors copied, there would be not subsequent works published. It’s a step removed, but these forgeries exist solely because of existing copyright law.
on August 3rd, 2007 at 5:39 am
Yeah, I thought about that. I think that what these guys are doing is great regardless. We disagree on the IP issue. I’m sure that there will be a post in the future where it’ll be better to hash this out…
on August 3rd, 2007 at 12:22 pm
True, and we’ll hash later. But there’s one other point that’s interesting. As usual, when the government outlaws something, it makes it valuable to break that law. For instance, because insider trading is illegal, it makes it extremely valuable to engage in insider trading, because you can monopolize the market when no one else is engaged in it. The same thing with copyright violations–knock-offs are extremely profitable because of the high-risk, high-reward of copyright violations.
Hmm, this sounds like a good economics paper: “Insider Trading, Copyright Violations, and Alaskan Crab Fishing: High-Risk, High-Reward.”