Harry Potter's French publishers have decided not to sue a 16-year-old fan who produced an amateur translation of Deathly Hallows, the concluding volume of the series. The boy undertook to translate the book into French when he discovered that the official French edition would lag the English by three months — he was worried that his monolingual peers would have their enjoyment of the book ruined by spoilers leaking over from the English-speaking world.
The boy has already spent a night in jail and was facing counterfeiting charges. After a firestorm of worldwide negative publicity, the French publishers — in consultation with JK Rowling — decided that suing this child was a losing proposition.
No word on whether the people who thought that putting him in jail for a night would get any kind of promotion, though.
(Thanks, Mike!)
