J. K. Rowling held out an olive branch on Wednesday to the Harry Potter look-alike who wants to publish a guide to her books and whose publisher she is suing for copyright infringement. Ms. Rowling seemed clearly wounded after the previous day's testimony by the writer of the guide, Steven Jan Vander Ark. Mr. Vander Ark broke into sobs on the witness stand Tuesday as he said that he had once been one of her biggest fans, but now felt cast out of the “Harry Potter community” by her lawsuit. Ms. Rowling told the judge in Federal District Court in Manhattan that she had been misunderstood. Mr. Vander Ark watched from the back of the room as the trial drew to a close. “I never ever once wanted to stop Mr. Vander Ark from doing his own guide — never ever,” she said as she took the stand for the second time in the three-day trial, as the last rebuttal witness. “Do your book, but please, change it so it does not take as much of my work.” Her plea came on a day that began with the judge, Robert P. Patterson, urging Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers Entertainment, the company that produces the Harry Potter movies, to try to settle the case. They are suing Mr. Vander Ark's publisher, RDR Books, based in Michigan, to stop publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon. Ms. Rowling contends in the lawsuit that the lexicon copies large chunks of material from her own books while adding little new information and insight. Judge Patterson said that he loved literature and that his father had been a fan of Shakespearean tragedy, but he reminded the parties that in “Bleak House,” the character Miss Flite faithfully attends every day of the trial and finally dies in her little attic. “A very sad story,” Judge Patterson said. “Litigation isn't always the best way to solve things.” But if Judge Patterson thought he could wave a magic wand and cast a happy-ending spell on the proceedings, the lawyers seemed intent on proving him wrong. Even after Ms. Rowling's conciliatory words, the lawyers for both sides came on strong in their closing arguments. Ms. Rowling's lawyer, Dale M. Cendali, concentrated on marketing, saying the guide could hurt Ms. Rowling's ability to sell books and Warner Brothers' interest in marketing movies and merchandise related to Harry Potter. If the guide were published, Ms. Cendali said, she envisioned readers saying: “‘You know what? I guess I don't really need the rest of the Harry Potter books because I just read the big giveaways.” Ms. Cendali joked that the harm could even fall upon lawyers. “Whether that means our bills will now be paid, I don't know,” she added. The guide, she contended, would be in direct competition with Ms. Rowling's own books. “This is about people trying to sell this for $24.95 as the definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia, in bookstores right next to the Harry Potter books,” she said. The trial ended on Wednesday, and the judge, who is hearing the case without a jury, gave the lawyers three weeks to file more papers before he makes a decision. An expert witness for the plaintiffs, Jeri Johnson, an American expatriate who is a senior tutor at Oxford University, seemed to play the role of Dolores Umbridge, the Ministry of Magic's apparatchik at Hogwarts, as she testified. She dripped contempt as she referred to Mr. Vander Ark's work as “the so-called lexicon.” She said she found Mr. Vander Ark's commentary in the book to be “weak waggishness.” On cross-examination, David Hammer, a lawyer for the publisher, pointed out that Ms. Rowling herself made vulgar jokes in her books about troll boogers and phlegm. He suggested that the problem might be that as an Oxford don, Ms. Johnson was too high-minded. “You yourself would not make a joke about phlegm?” he asked the witness. “Only with my 9-year-old,” Ms. Johnson replied. In his closing arguments, Anthony Falzone, another lawyer for the publisher, said that under the law, what mattered was not the quality of the book but whether it transformed Ms. Rowling's material in some way. The guide, he said, “organizes, synthesizes and distills” thousands of pages and “somewhere near a million words.” Mr. Falzone said that if spoiling plot points was a reason to suppress the book, as Ms. Cendali argued, then: “It's spoiled all over the place. It's everywhere. You'd have to suppress it all.” For her part, Ms. Rowling repeated her first-day testimony that she was motivated by outrage, not money. She has said she was so upset by the prospect of Mr. Vander Ark's guide that she was suffering from writer's block. If she loses the case, Ms. Rowling said on Wednesday, “the floodgates will open,” and writers everywhere will lose control of their material. Judge Patterson asked whether she really thought people would rather read the lexicon than her original work. “Can you imagine anyone reading this lexicon for entertainment value?” the judge asked. “Honestly, you're Honor, no,” Ms. Rowling replied. “But if I may say it without being arrogant or vain, I think there are funny things in there - and I wrote them.” __
