Warner threatens Web fans of boy wizard

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. 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.’"

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."

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