Reddit mentions of The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials

It's up to you to decide. This guy's exaggerating this case. JKR has always been fully supportive of fan art and fan fictions and fan sites, and people generally exploring her world with each other. Here's an overview of the trial, though I'm linking it more so you can click this site's sources at the bottom of the page.

The long and short of it is, the HP Lexicon was a huge fan encyclopedic site that I and everyone I know used for reference. The site owners wanted to publish it as a book for-profit. Rowling herself wanted to publish an encyclopedia. This was not the first encyclopedia or similar book JKR prevented, it's just the most publicized, she also stopped Mugglenet from publishing a for-profit encyclopedia.

I think the most important thing to remember is JKR/WB had been through a strange phase where ultimately they decided they were fine with original fan works for-profit. For more info, I'd read Harry, A History, by Melissa Anelli (if I had it in front of me, I'd find quotes, but I'm at work). She explains that when the internet was still fairly new, tons of kids with HP fansites were getting cease and desist letters. WB just didn't realize the consequences of what they were doing and did a 180, apologized and allowed the sites (if I'm not mistaken, this was known as Potter Wars, but I forget). A few years after that was the issue of Wizard Rock bands (you read that right). The pioneers of this genre were Harry and the Potters in 2002. They were also told to stop performing and selling merchandise, but eventually after a relatively undramatic battle, WB decided they were okay. So for years, JKR/WB had experienced their fair share of fan works for-profit. I'm not in JKR's head, but she seemed to love and support all of it.

What makes the HP Lexicon book different is that it was not original work, it was "just" a re-organization of JKR's work, and perhaps more importantly, had the exact same purpose of what JKR was planning on publishing. The reason I use the quotes is because it's obviously a ton of work to organize that information into an encyclopedia. Also, it looks like RDR (the publishing company that was sued) acted a bit shady and probably didn't help their case, but I'm not a lawyer and can't really judge their actions as one, this is just the impression I get reading the links I sent you.

Also, the HP Lexicon book was still published, meeting the guidelines of the suit, but after all that, is exactly like an encyclopedia anyway. ??

Personally, I wish they hadn't sued. I would have known the difference and still bought both, but I guess less massive fans might have been confused which one to buy, which was the main point of the suit in the first place.

As a huge huge fan of Rowling, if there's anything I've learned admiring a human like a god (which I can now see I did with Rowling) is that she isn't a god. There's things she's done or said (not to mention plays she put her name on) that I wish she hadn't, but she's human. She also started her own charity, Lumos, to bring light to the mis-used funds for third world orphanages that have poor conditions for the kids, most of which are not even orphans and have families that want them. She pays all her taxes to her country because she appreciates what they did when she needed them. She is an advocate for equal rights, and ultimately does a lot of good. Nobody is completely embodied in their wiki pages, and nobody is perfect either.

I don't necessarily disagree that this would be a copyright violation of the official maps (I haven't seen them, and don't know how much OP lifted); but just to add some thoughts re: fan-fic works: just because a work is licensed doesn't mean it needs to be, and they are certainly not always licensed. The trademark ("Star Wars") most certainly would need to be licensed, but fan spin-offs wouldn't necessarily need to be licensed unless they centered around, e.g. a character with a developed personality from the original. So, say, a fan fiction about young Ned Stark would probably need to be licensed (Salinger v Colting), but a fan fiction of an unrelated family from Mole's Town (that doesn't otherwise infringe the trademarks of GoT) would probably not be. A recent Star Trek universe case that might have put some finer bounds on this was settled this year; the defendants didn't survive summary judgment (meaning it wasn't clearly fair use) and they would have had to go through a lengthy trial to determine whether the accumulation of copied elements constituted infringement. Not fun.

Also looking at the official map alone doesn't make it a copy- if he did all the individual city artwork himself, picked and chose what cities to include, took artistic liberties with shading, borders, the compass rose, etc., then it's a pretty gray area whether he infringed the copyright of the original maps. I see that his map does have "A Song of Ice and Fire" at the top, which he would obviously have to scrub to sell.

On the other hand, methinks if the fine borders of the map, which obviously can't be derived from the stories independently of other copyrighted maps, were copied from those maps, that would weigh pretty heavily against OP. But then, see The Lexicon, whose authors all but won a suit against J.K. Rowling (she "won" but they were allowed to publish their book with some directly copied passages removed).

This one?

https://www.amazon.ca/Lexicon-Unauthorized-Fiction-Related-Materials/dp/1571431748

Check and mate.