THERE are few spectacles more unedifying than that of an author who has got way too precious about their work, and who seems to believe that the world has a duty to treat their literary creations with the same loving devotion they obviously think the little darlings deserve.

In that respect, the sight of Harry Potter creator JK Rowling gurning on again about how much she loves the chocolate frog-munching little wizard and all his annoying chums at Hogwarts, and how much it hurts her sensitive writerly soul when they are mistreated -- despite not actually existing -- must rank amongst the biggest irritants in a publishing world not exactly short of prima donnas.

The occasion of Rowling's latest outburst was the attempted publication of an A-Z Harry Potter Lexicon by a man who, for the last decade, has run a website devoted to the world she created. His name is Steve Vander Ark and he has now been hauled into a US District courtroom in New York where JK and Warner Bros Entertainment, which bought the rights to the Harry Potter franchise, are deploying all the considerable financial and legal powers at their disposal to stop him.

If they'd just gone there and thrashed the whole thing out on the basis of legal precedent and copyright law, it wouldn't be so bad; but JK Rowling had to turn the whole thing into an emotional drama about her relationship with her characters and how much Harry's welfare meant to her. She was soon in tears. Of course she was. Once again, we were back into tales of the starving single mother writing in Edinburgh cafes to keep warm.

As a slice of soap opera, it works every time. But it's been a long time since JK Rowling was a struggling single mum. The little guy now in the equation is Vander Ark, a bespectacled unemployed school librarian and Star Trek devotee who looks a bit like Harry Potter himself, minus the scar (ie, a bit of a geek), whose planned book, even its own publishers reckon, will be lucky to sell a few thousand copies. To listen to Rowling, you'd think he was stealing food from the mouth of her baby.

Never mind Pat Kenny and the Battle of Gorse Hill. This really is David and Goliath stuff. The Harry Potter author is the first person in history to become a dollar billionaire as a result of writing. She is indeed "Rowling" in it, and part of the reason she achieved that was because of the extraordinary obsessive devotion of millions of fans who immersed themselves totally in the world she created. These anoraks could bore any normal person to death with a detailed description of the difference between a Nimbus 2000 broomstick and a Firebolt, and you wouldn't want to get stuck next to one of them on the DART -- but to an author they're gold dust, since they generate the hype which makes a woman seriously wealthy.

Steve Vander Ark's website was part of that phenomenom. A big part of it. Now that he wants to publish a book as testament to his 10 years of hard work on her behalf, it's heigh ho, heigh ho, off to the attorneys we go.

The problem for JK Rowling is that, while last week she was trumpeting her emotional jurisdiction over Harry Potter and comparing her relationship to him as that of mother and child, in the real world she sold some rights in the character and the series long ago to those nice people at Warner Bros. Not something mothers tend to do with their children.

As a result, Harry has become arguably the most hawked fictional character of our times. Far from protecting him from the grasping hands of filthy commerce, Harry's literary mummy delivered him wholesale into it, which is why his face is now plastered across everything from pyjamas to coffee mugs to kids' lunchboxes.

There's not a piece of JK Rowling's fictional wizarding world which hasn't been plundered and exploited and squeezed dry for every last cent. In the process, JK got very rich and Warner Bros, already rich to start with, got even richer. Fair play to them. Commerce makes the world go round.

But you don't do that without a price, and the price is that the characters and worlds which were part of your private internal landscape become public property. They're not entirely yours anymore, or even the possession of the youngsters reading the books. They intrude on the consciousness of everyone who inhabits the planet, whether they want it in there or not.

So someone somewhere might put out some unauthorised artwork, or publish a book about your book. Get over it. That's what happens to all bestselling authors. They accept it as part and parcel of success, and one which is more than compensated for by the rewards.

As in the Pat Kenny case, the judge in New York has urged JK Rowling and Steve Vander Ark to come to a settlement to avoid protracted legal action, potentially dragging on for years. If they can't, then here's hoping that America's proud tradition of vigorously upholding freedom of speech wins out again, and that Warner Bros and JK Rowling are told to take a running jump. We should be standing up for the little guy. He's only trying to publish a compendium of commonly known facts about a famous series of books, not reveal classified secret documents on which the fate of the world hinges.

He is, in the great scheme of things, just a nut -- no offence intended.

Only someone who was as wrapped up in their own publicity as JK Rowling would think the best way to deal with him was with a sledgehammer. Get over yourself, woman. It's only showbiz.

- Eilis O'Hanlon