The Harry line between publicity and piracy

By Tom Tapp

The final Harry Potter book has leaked and the publisher is freaked.

But how much does Scholastic really stand to lose? Maybe nothing. That's because the line between piracy and marketing is getting increasingly blurry.

In Hollywood, studios are now frequently letting slip pictures, video and information that once was held closely until just before a picture's release. Witness The Wachowski Brothers' decision to put an interview with Christina Ricci up on YouTube just days after she'd been cast in their yet-to-be-filmed "Speed Racer."

The resulting clip is lame, but it does give an idea of how Hollywood's most internet savvy minds (these guys did "The Matrix" after all) are thinking about the web.

While still wary, some networks have begun to embrace YouTube as well. ABC is apparently letting pirated clips stay up if they tease a program in the right way.

Search for "Lost" on the site and the first result you get is a fan-edited version of all the show's footage concerning its central plane crash.

Anyone who's going to seek out and sit through the footage is either A.) A curious, uninitiated potential viewer or B.) An avid fan. Either way, the repackaged footage will only deepen interest.

Maybe Scholastic will reap the same sort of windfall (albeit on a completely different scale) from the current media frenzy.

After all, the pirated "copies" of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" available online are really just barely legible photographs of the book's pages. That's not an ideal environment for reading.

Like the "Lost" compilation viewers, most fans avid enough to seek out these pirated "Potter" pages are likely to be driven to buy their own copy of the book.

One might also think knowing who dies in the final "Harry Potter" would ruin one's appetite for the tome. But if one has already invested the time to read the previous six books, knowing the saga's conclusion may not matter.

That's because reading a series of books (or watching a film after reading the book) is often not about the plot or events related therein, it's about living in that world for a time. This is especially true of the Potter books' rich realm, which New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani compares in her review of the book to that of "The Lord of the Rings."

In fact, fifty-plus years after Tolkien revealed the end to that series, and nearly four years after Peter Jackson did the same onscreen, those books are still selling well.