All publicity is good publicity - even if it is illegal. So when internet pirates spread the news of Harry Potter's fate around the world - several days before his purdah ended - they did the Potter publishers a favour.

Reading electronic books is no fun at the best of times: only the stingiest fan would prefer 759 pages of scarcely legible Potter online to the $18 Amazon version. But headlines about the leaks were priceless: according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, only eight per cent of Americans were closely following Harry news a week before the July 21 release. But everyone loves a secret breached, so all the buzz over online leaks gave Harry an all-new news profile in the final hours of his seclusion. America's top booksellers insisted not a single reader would be lost to all that piracy; at least they know good news when they see it.

So why all the lawsuits? Scholastic, the otherwise obscure US publisher of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, went into legal overdrive over the secrecy breach, pursuing pirates into the virtual world. Scholastic filed a subpoena to get the real-world identity of the user who posted a copy of the book on Gaiaonline.com; Gaia Online gave it up immediately, took down the copy and banned the user from the site for two weeks. Everybody with anything to lose online did the same: soon the unauthorised Potter disappeared from the reputable realms of cyber-space.

Violation

Scholastic had every right to do so. Posting significant digital chunks or whole copies of copyrighted works infringes US copyright law. But unfortunately right does not make might in the digital world. Scholastic had the right, but not the ability, to keep pirated Harry offline. Copies of the book were - and are - easily available from internet sites using peer-to-peer technology. They facilitate the sharing of copies between two users, rather than hosting the copies themselves, says Eric Garland of BigChampagne, a company that tracks illegal downloads of copyrighted material.

In cyberspace, there is always someone with nothing to lose - and those people kept the copies coming. The legal pursuit of early Harry copies online was ultimately fruitless: all it did was generate headlines.

Then the print copies started popping up. The New York Times published a pre-embargo review of a copy that it says was purchased legally at a bookstore. And then, inevitably, a copy was posted on eBay. Will Collier says he acquired his Potter entirely legally, when an online bookseller sent him copies before publication. He sold the book - and then was told by eBay that the author's agent had objected.

eBay agreed to take down the auction as part of its Vero (Verified Rights Owner) programme, which allows rights owners to object to auctions that infringe their rights.

Collier objected that there was nothing illegal about his actions: he got the Potter legally. Under the US "first sale doctrine", publishers have the right to control the initial sale of a book but not subsequent sales, says Jonathan Band, an expert on internet copyright issues. But he points out that to eBay, that might not have mattered: the auction site says it "respect(s) all rights owners' complaints concerning copyright infringement" and is "not in a position to evaluate the relative merits of their positions". So eBay took the Potter auction down without knowing if it was lawful.

Too busy

Scholastic says it is too busy celebrating the publication to comment on who it is suing. The company has sued the bookseller that allegedly shipped print copies early (to people like Collier). But it is not clear what it plans to do to those who may have got those copies and posted them online.

"We can say with certainty that someone out there downloaded the book and read it without purchasing it. But would that person otherwise have bought it? Probably not," Garland says. "These weren't people who were looking for an inferior copy instead of buying it, they were people who couldn't wait for Christmas morning." Those kinds of people doubtless bought the book at midnight anyway. It is hard to see how litigation can make them any keener.

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