Five months after author J.K. Rowling was nearly brought to tears while testifying in front of a New York courtroom, the woman behind "Harry Potter" had reason to smile Monday (September 8) with news that a judge had ruled in her favor in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against RDR Books, publishers of "The Harry Potter Lexicon."

In addition to blocking publication of the reference tome, Judge Robert P. Patterson awarded Rowling and co-plaintiff Warner Bros. Entertainment $6,750 in statutory damages, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"I took no pleasure at all in bringing legal action and am delighted that this issue has been resolved favourably," Rowling wrote in a statement. "I went to court to uphold the right of authors everywhere to protect their own original work. The court has upheld that right."

At issue in the case was the U.S. legal doctrine of fair use, a complicated, ambiguous law that seeks to protect copyright holders from unsanctioned use of their work. Rowling claimed in April, and again in a recent statement, that the proposed Potter reference guide stepped over the line from acceptable usage into "wholesale theft."

"The proposed book took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own. Now the court has ordered that it must not be published," she wrote. "Many books have been published which offer original insights into the world of Harry Potter. The 'Lexicon' just is not one of them."

Reference guides, of course, are published all the time. In order to avoid copyright infringement, it is necessary to divine the "purpose and character of the use." In simpler terms, the work must be "transformative" — so does it add to the culture's appreciation and/or knowledge of a work, or does it merely seek to supersede the original?

This was the point of contention most argued in the court case, with lawyers for Rowling insisting that the proposed book "takes too much and does too little." In other words, it adds little or no commentary or criticism.

Judge Patterson touched upon this distinction in his ruling.

"While the 'Lexicon,' in its current state, is not a fair use of the Harry Potter works, reference works that share the 'Lexicon' 's purpose of aiding readers of literature generally should be encouraged rather than stifled," he said, according to the WSJ. "[The] 'Lexicon' [however] appropriates too much of Rowling's creative work for its purposes as a reference guide."

Before becoming a book, "The Harry Potter Lexicon" was a Web site run by librarian Steve Vander Ark. The site was repeatedly praised by Rowling early this decade.