Harry Potter delivers the Deathly Lawsuits

PUBLISHING of the Harry Potter series of books, Scholastic, has been going on a DMCA rampage in a bid to get torrents of the new Potter novel off the internet.

Of course, lawyers being lawyers, they've got precisely the wrong targets - and have been threatening lawsuits to news outlets covering the story.

TechCrunch is just one news site being coaxed into removing all information about the leak under the false pretence that to report about the leak is an offence under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US. Fortunately for news reporters and free speech everywhere, that's not the case, and it seems that most bloggers and journalists are seeing Scholastic's legal effort for what it is - a desperate bid to preserve book sales on Friday night and an attempt to keep the story out of the mainstream media.

And, perhaps, frustration that the torrent hosting - at Pirate Bay - is in Sweden, thus beyond the jurisdiction of US courts.

What Scholastic apparently doesn't realise is that the fanatic Potter fans downloading the torrent will be precisely the same ones in line on Friday night, queuing to get their hands on the official copy.

The lawsuit is just another example of how companies are attempting to use 'chilling effects' - threats and officious letters - to try and curtail genuine journalism and news reporting on the web. Unfortunately for them, many bloggers are getting wiser to this and are refusing to be intimidated. This is as it should be. We here at the INQ receive enough lawsuits to start our own paper recyling factory, but we don't let that worry us too much.