Harry Potter BitTorrent Fake Upsets J.K. Rowling Fan
Getting a pre-release item via P2P can be an exciting experience for some file-sharers. Unfortunately, BitTorrent users hoping to snare a leaked copy of the final book in the Harry Potter series haven’t been getting quite what they’d hoped for.
Files being distributed via BitTorrent and purporting to be a copy of the final book in J.K Rowling’s series were not leaked copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows” but a piece of Potter fan fiction called “The Seventh Horcrux”, written by Melindaleo.
Melindaleo, a dedicated fan to the end, gives her work away for free on the internet. However, she denies that she had anything to do with the renaming of the .torrent files that gave quite a bit of extra publicity for her work.
Melindaleo, worried that she could have inadvertently given her community a bad name, said “I got nervous that I’d be jinxing the whole fanfic writing thing for everyone”. She also showed concern that she may attract the attention of Rowling’s lawyers, something that uploaders of this particular torrent won’t have to be concerned about.
Back in 2004, J.K. Rowling gave her blessing to fans who wanted to write their own Harry Potter books and put them online. A spokesman said she was “flattered people wanted to write their own stories” based on her characters.
