I think mostly it's just that JKR is astronomically rich, and seems to be beating someone up for money. The fact that that someone is a fan makes it worse.

Well the fan in question seems to be a major league asshole. Took a lot of peoples work and a (claimed) non-profit site and turned it into a for-profit exercise. The other end of that stick is that lexicons are one area where "Fair use" really does including really large amounts of source material. The law on this I don't know. Gaiman seems to think it a legal grey area. My position is that grey areas in copyright law should generally be settled in terms of putting things into public domain. Creative work builds on other creative work. The more we shrink the creative commons the more we slow the long term ability to progress technically or artistically.

Copyright is a lot more rigorous than in was in 1968. Real compensation for most artists has not noticeably increased . I don't think the rate of artistic and technical innovation has increased either. Not that we have not had a lot of innovation. But I don't think strengthening copyright law accelerated it in any way. (To be clear I don't think anything accelerated. We are not progressing any faster than in 1968; progress continued; the rate of change did not increase.)

I think mostly it's just that JKR is astronomically rich, and seems to be beating someone up for money. The fact that that someone is a fan makes it worse.

Also, the fact that she admits to having used the site herself when she was too lazy to look something up does not win her any sympathy points from me.

From Paul Krugman's blog:

I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.

This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.

Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.

Update: Several commenters mentioned Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels. It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get.

I kind of love the idea that Krugman wanted to be a psychohistorian.

Ah, psychohistory. The idea of this was seductive to me too. But I got no follow through.

Paul Krugman has good taste in Science Fiction. Beyond This Horizon may have been the worst written Heinlein novel ever. The worst Heinlein novel ever Farnham's Freehold was marginally better written, but horribly offensive beyond anything else Heinlein ever wrote.

TB, I can't make that last sentence make sense.

Hope the editing improved it. Farnham's Freehold was better written in that the prose was marginally better, the characterization was marginally better, the plot was marginally more believable. But it had some stuff that was really offensive. Given that the prose and so on was still awful, even if not so awful as BTH, the extreme ick factor outweighed everything else, and made it the worse novel - even if it had slightly better (but still awful) prose and so on.

I loved Farnham's Freehold when I was in my teens and eating up everything Heinlein ever wrote. Perhaps I should revisit it. And then again maybe not.

I've been reluctant to go into specifics. If you like I'll email you offline.

thanks but I think I'd rather retain my illusions.