Sunday, April 22, 2007

Anatomy of a HOAX: Harry Potter 7 LEAKED

I am a huge Harry Potter fan. First read the first 2 books in 1999 and was forever hooked. In the past 8 years I've waited in line for the books at midnight like everyone else. Last year I was fedup with the lines and was happy to find a .pdf of the Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince online a week before it's release. I bought the book about a month later, as any real Potter fan would. I wondered how long the book would take to leak to the internet this time around. So I've been searching every month for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows/Deathly Hollows. This week on a fav torrent site I found a 659 page book that looked like the right thing.

The words seem to go the way they should and on page 8 we find Dudley Dursley is a wizard! Which made much sense and got me hooked. 24 hours later I was satisfied with the ending to the series. So happy I made it into a cell phone ebook and sent it to 2 friends. So happy I posted about my glee on livejournal...a friend's response, "uh, wasn't that found to be fake?"

Harry Potter Fake Links

WHAT, WHAT WHA? No Way! It's perfect this version! Harry Potter and Ginny make out all the time. Harry and Ron get wasted on Firewhiskey a bunch! The story is told from the pov of all the main characters for once! Harry is the 7th Horocrux and lives in the end! Everyone gets their own scar! All the things a harry potter fan would desire...and it's fanfic? Well, I guess that makes sense.

In fact, this new Harry Potter? A piece of fanfic by melindaleo called The Seventh Horocrux.
The Admin Team of PhoenixSong.net have recently learned that there is a "leaked" file of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows floating around the internet, specifically in bit torrent form. While people obviously have different opinions on "spoilers" in general, this one is especially troublesome because it is actually a plagiarized version of our own Melindaleo's fan fic, "The Seventh Horcrux", available legitimately here at PhoenixSong: http://www.phoenixsong.net/fanfiction/story/3517/ Please be aware that Melindaleo was in no way involved in re-titling her fan fic as the seventh book or in trying to pass it off as a leaked copy of the seventh book. Someone else did this without her knowledge or permission, and she has been quite upset and worried, especially about the fact that people may be being duped by this situation. - Phoenixsong.net

Yes, it's a 659 page piece of fanfic. And quite possibly, it may turn out to be better than JKR's book 7. Seriously.

Something real of interest to close us out....the new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film trailer. For real.