Today Vice President Joe Biden met with Mayor Bloomberg for a closed door meeting at Gracie Mansion. The items on the agenda remain a mystery, but judging by this photo, here's how we imagine it ended: more ›

Yesterday, British newspaper the Daily Mail reported on an Old Bridge, NJ resident's current goal: To weigh 1,000 pounds in two years. But now she tells the Post that it might be an impossible dream. Donna Simpson, 42, who is currently 604 pounds, says, "When you have a 3-year-old daughter and you’re trying to run a household, things like this tend to be a fantasy... This whole thousand-pound goal has gotten blown way out of proportion" more ›

J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. have won their copyright infringement lawsuit against a web site operator who intended to publish an encyclopedia based on the author's multi-billion dollar fantasy franchise. Today a judge agreed with Rowling's argument that Steven Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon would amount to "the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work." Vander Ark and his publisher had contended that the lexicon was a fair use allowable by law for reference books. But today's ruling found that it "appropriates too much of Rowling's creative work for its purposes as a reference guide." The judge also awarded Rowling and Warner Bros. $6,750 in statutory damages, which should finally permit the struggling author to enjoy a modest retirement. more ›

While a judge deliberates on whether Harry Potter superfan Steve Vander Ark and his publisher violated copyright law by producing a lexicon based on J.K. Rowling’s hit novels, the 50-year-old librarian has simply been trying to keep it together. This week he told the New Yorker all about the trauma caused by the recent trial, during which he broke down in tears. more ›

As the Harry Potter copyright infringement trial drew to a close yesterday, the judge urged the two parties to use their “imaginations” and agree to a settlement. Judge Robert Patterson professed a love of literature and invoked Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as cautionary tale, “A very sad story. Litigation isn’t always the best way to solve things." more ›

The 50-year-old librarian on the receiving end of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Harry Potter author was driven to tears yesterday while testifying in a Manhattan courtroom. Steven Jan Vander Ark (pictured), a former Star Trek fan from Michigan whose exhaustive website The Harry Potter Lexicon would be published in a print version by RDR Books, told lawyers that he was devastated by the lashing he’s received from J.K. Rowling and "the Harry Potter community... This has been an important part of my life for the last nine years or so.” more ›

As detailed yesterday, the proposed book is essentially a print version of a Harry Potter fan site that Rowling previously awarded for excellence in web fandom (something she now “regrets bitterly”). But the website is free, and the billionaire author (along with Warner Brothers Entertainment) claims that a print version, if sold, would amount to “the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.” Rowling went on to dismiss the book as “sloppy, lazy, dire and atrocious,” which is ironic because Rowling once confessed that she consulted the Lexicon website to check facts while writing the Potter series. more ›