I’m a little conflicted about this one.
Okay - I got over it.
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Sure. But your local government’s budget for defending against a copyright infringement lawsuit is almost certainly dwarfed by Warner’s legal budget to bring such a lawsuit.
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That’s certainly true, but both the library and WB are, or ought to be, affected by public opinion, too. It’s one thing to send a letter to a library and another thing to have to show up in court and say you want to squash a reading program. If I were the gov. lawyer and I was sure we were in the right, I might roll the dice on that one. It might get me a shot at the attorney general job one day. 
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I am convinced that a lot of copies of the wizard game were bought with no intention of ever playing it.
At least on Steam, the player count dropped off rapidly after release. I looked at the 24 hour player count about a month after release and it was below Football Manager 2023 (AKA the old version of that game that looks like a spreadsheet). Warner Brothers and Petunia won’t care though, they’ve got their money.
I wasn’t looking for the wizard game btw, someone asked me about how many players some other game had for multiplayer.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if a portion of the game sales were through something akin to astroturfing
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Like the organisations that bulk-buy right wing political books to make them “bestsellers”.
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Extremely likely in the West. However, there are also other territories to look at. My friend in Taiwan told me physical copies of the game sold out fairly quickly. I doubt they’re trying to send the same transphobic message and just want that popular wizard property.
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I was working in a bookstore during the whole HP thing, so in advance of the last book, i read the series. It’s pretty much a mediocre rehashing of common fantasy tropes, and as @MadLibrarian says, there are many authors who did it better… the success of the movies helped the books along, too. I’m not really sure why it caught on the way it did, but knowing what I know now about the author’s bigotry, I don’t want any part of the franchise.
I can’t blame the libraries who are doing whatever they can to promote literacy in kids, but I think it’s cruel of WB to smack them with copyright nonsense. I hope the bad publicity backfires on them, hard.
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True… but mostly, it’s the transphobia that’ll sink it. I know I won’t seek it out…
Yeah, all true…
Do you think that a public library has the deep pockets to go to court over this? It doesn’t matter if they’re actually fully within their legal rights, the point is to tie them up in the courts for years, and a local public library can’t afford that shit.
Yeah, probably…
We know that conservative groups and churches will do this for certain books or films by Christian production companies, so could be.
Yep, or churches that guy up blocks of tickets for Christian films.
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I was in Kings Cross Station last week, the queues to be photographed at Platform 9 3/4 were as long as they’ve ever been. I suspect there are enough fans who don’t care to make the reboot successful enough.
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Not that Warner Bros would consider the promotion of illiteracy as a problem in any way.
Their kids in their private schools would be just fine.
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The WB had the incentive to fudge those numbers because of future deals. Back in the pandemic all book sales rose except for Rowlings’ books which had cratered, Niantic (who also made Pokemon Go) stopped support of their Harry Potter game after not doing too well and the not-quite-Harry Potter spinoff movies didn’t do that hot in the box office.
Sunk cost fallacy?
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The point is to make them care. 
What we consume matters, it’s not just a matter of people’s tastes. When people with the cultural power of JK Rowling is making it her mission in life to aid in the destruction of an entire group of people, that fucking matters and people should pay it mind and talk about it.
I’m really sick of people not giving a shit about other human beings, simply because they don’t understand them. Fuck that. We can and SHOULD do better.
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Expecto Bigflopus!
Nobody wants a reboot of this transphobic author’s material. Oh, and Leavo Da Librarianum Alonus! They can promote any book in their library. It’s call FAIR USE!
Any pro bono lawyers out there willing to counter sue for harassment?
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Mark me safe for having never read a Harry Potter book, but there are so many, many good or great even fantasy series books now that my daughter devores and excitedly fills me in on the best bits. Plenty of other books to read, though not as hyped. And, I’d like to add that we found a chronicle she missed at of all places the library.
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I go past that platform fairly regularly, quite a few of the folks who are there in line are from Asia, South America, and so forth. It’s a worldwide phenomenon for better or worse. I get the idea that most of them are simply unaware of what a hunk of excrement the author is.
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This expands the discussion to talking about copyright, the Internet archive, and music…
I also posted this over in the follow up thread…
Private corporations want you to forget that our culture is not just a product to be bought and sold, but informs who we are and how we got here… like much else, letting corporations colonize ALL aspects of our lives will not benefit us, our culture, or our future. This is true across the board. These for-profit corporations DO NOT HAVE OUR WELL-BEING IN MIND. They care about the money they make and that’s all. They are working to extract as much value out of culture as they can. that’s it. Don’t be fooled that corporations will ever do what is beneficial to the public. They will not. Look at what they do, not what they say.
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I think, from JKR’s perspective, it may rankle her that the majority of the young acting talent from the original have spoken out against her TERFdom, so she may want to cast new people who are untroubled by her transphobia. It’s hard for me to see how a retread of the same story is going to get new eyeballs on it. I couldn’t imagine someone redoing LOTR any time soon though that finished before the Potter movies. (Though I wouldn’t mind a better and briefer Hobbit movie.)
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I never read it because when the books first became popular i was reading LOTR, and in my younger brother’s class the teachers were getting all of the kids to read this popular new franchise (Harry Potter). So in my mind that was the fantasy book series for kids, so i never had interest in the books even as they gained in popularity. And i have seem some of the movies because friends and past partners were fans so i went for their sake.
I get why people got into it initially but i am glad i never had any emotional investment into it so staying away is an easy choice for me.
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