Quelle Crime! Teen Held for Potter Book Posted en Français
A 16-year-old has been arrested and briefly jailed for allegedly translating the entire 759-page book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into French and posting it on the Internet within days of its July 21 release.
The teen, a high school student from Aix-en-Provence in southern France, is not named because he is a juvenile and apparently did not intend to profit from his stunning act of intellectual wizardry, reports the Associated Press.
However, he has been charged with violating intellectual property rights, and those associated with the book’s publication say they are glad authorities are taking the crime seriously, because bootlegged translations are a serious problem throughout the world.
Although the Harry Potter series, which has so far sold 325 million copies worldwide, has been translated into 64 languages, the official French translator, Jean-Francois Menard, is still working on Harry Potter et les reliques de la mort, as “Deathly Hallows” will be titled here, since he only received the English version on its July 21 release date, AP says. His version is expected to be available in late October.
Meanwhile, a number of French readers already know how the new Harry Potter book ends—the Le Parisien newspaper revealed the book’s conclusion in an article printed upside down.
