CHINESE DISSIDENT RECEIVES PEN AWARD

Yang Tongyan, a Chinese writer serving a 12-year prison term for posting anti-government articles on the Internet, will receive this year’s PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.

The $10,000 award, announced Friday, is made annually to an imprisoned or persecuted writer in jeopardy because of health or other reasons. It is underwritten by Ms. Goldsmith, a historian, author, and philanthropist, and presented by the American chapter of PEN, an international organization that monitors the persecution of writers.

“I was particularly pleased that the advisory committee selected someone from China,” Ms. Goldsmith said in a telephone interview. “With the Olympics and the economic conference following them, this is a unique chance to focus on human rights there, and on the secrecy in which they’ve conducted these repressions.”

The advisory committee includes representatives from other human rights organizations, as well as the president of the Carnegie Corp., Vartan Gregorian.

Mr. Yang, an essayist, poet, and novelist who suffers from diabetes and arthritis, was arrested in December 2005 for “subverting state authority.” The following May, the Zhenjiang Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to 12 years in prison.

Also known by his pen name Yang Tianshui, Mr. Yang previously spent a decade in Chinese prisons for his opposition to the treatment of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Bloomberg News

PROCTER & GAMBLE BRINGS THE BEAT

Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble is dipping its toes into the music industry by launching a record label with Island Def Jam Music Group. The joint venture will be called Tag Records — a nod to Procter & Gamble’s Tag body sprays. The label will be run by Island Urban President Jermaine Dupri, who helped produce the latest sales disappointment by his girlfriend, Janet Jackson.

Tag Records will unveil its first signing in May, and is promising a marketing budget 10 times the going rate of $1 million per artist.

“My goal is to find artists that have longevity written all over their face,” Mr. Dupri said, adding that Tag plans to launch two artists a year during the span of the three-year deal.

Staff Reporter of the Sun

ROWLING TO TESTIFY IN OWN LAWSUIT

Author J.K. Rowling is eager to tell a judge this week that one of her biggest fans is in fantasyland if he believes a “Harry Potter” encyclopedia he plans to publish does not violate her copyrights.

The showdown between Ms. Rowling and Steven Vander Ark is scheduled to last most of the week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Ms. Rowling is scheduled to testify today in a trial that is sure to generate huge interest among “Harry Potter” fans and the public. Her lawyer has arranged with the judge to have a private security guard for Ms. Rowling in the courtroom and for the author to spend breaks in the seclusion of a jury room — away from any diehard “Potter” fans in attendance. The trial comes eight months after Ms. Rowling published the final book in the widely popular “Harry Potter” series. The books have been published in 64 languages, sold more than 400 million copies, and spawned a film franchise that has pulled in $4.5 billion worldwide.

Ms. Rowling brought the lawsuit last year against Mr. Vander Ark’s publisher, RDR Books, to stop publication of “The Harry Potter Lexicon.”

Ms. Rowling is actually a big fan of the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site that Mr. Vander Ark runs. But she draws the line when it comes to publishing the book and charging $24.95. She also says it fails to include any of the commentary and discussion that enrich the Web site and calls it “nothing more than a rearrangement” of her own material.

One of her lawyers, Dan Shallman, on Friday told Judge Robert P. Patterson, who will hear the trial without a jury, that Ms. Rowling “feels like her words were stolen.” He said the author felt so personally violated that she made her own comparisons between her novels and the lexicon and was ready to testify about the similarities in dozens of instances.

David Saul Hammer, a lawyer for RDR Books, which plans to sell the lexicon, said the publisher will not challenge the claim by Ms. Rowling that much of the material in the lexicon infringed her copyrights.

But the judge will decide whether the use of the material by the small Muskegon, Mich., publisher was legal because it was used for some greater purpose, such as a scholarly pursuit.

Associated Press