Harry Potter goes to court

Now that "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is well on its way to selling out its first U.S. printing of more than 8 million copies, we hope that author J.K. Rowling and publisher Scholastic Inc. see the wisdom of dropping their suit against the New York Daily News.
The suit was filed last week within hours of the Daily News' running of a story that reported details of the book based on -- the book.
It seems that despite Scholastic's best effort to embargo the book until 12:01 a.m. Saturday, the Daily News got its hands on a copy. How? It bought it.
Oh, the horror. Can you imagine a world in which a free press is free to report on the biggest publishing phenomenon of the decade? What would become of the world if Scholastic and like-minded publishers can't control what people know and when they know it about a book?
Let's point out that the Daily News did not serialize the book or run huge gouts of text that would violate the publisher's copyright. We believe in copyrights and intellectual property and the sanctity of same. We're on record against all sorts of copyright infringement, including the authorized downloading of music and video from the Internet. If someone were to scan Rowling's book and put it on the Internet for all to read, we'd be against that too.
No skullduggery
Had a Daily News reporter broken into a Scholastic warehouse and stolen a copy of the latest Potter tome, we'd be against that too.
The Daily News simply lucked into a copy. A naive health store proprietor who received a small shipment of the book put it on display a few days early and an enterprising reporter bought a copy.
Scholastic responded with a $100 million suit, charging, among other things, that the Daily News' reporting had damaged its carefully orchestrated, $3 million marketing campaign.
We're hard-pressed to find fault with any author who can get millions of young readers to crack the cover on an 870-page book. One of the things we feel more strongly about than copyright infringement, is the value of reading and the need to instill a love of reading at an early age.
But we feel strongest about the First Amendment and a free and vigorous press, including the commercial press operated by Scholastic. Rowling is a British author and as such might be excused if she doesn't fully appreciate the beauty of the First Amendment. But a U.S. publisher should easily see that if a court can punish a U.S. newspaper for legitimate reportage, everyone's free speech rights -- even those of enormously popular British fiction writers and their publishers -- are in danger.
Besides, clearly nothing the Daily News did damaged sales of "Phoenix," making the Scholastic suit not only ill-advised but unsupported.