Can you believe that it is the last Charms lesson of Year Six already? We will do a quick review of the year’s content today, but keep in mind that this is by no means a complete review. You will still need to work through your notes to make sure that you are properly prepared for your final, but I want to point you towards a couple of key terms that will be especially important for your further education. Other than that, our main focus will be on study aids and how charms can help you in the world of academia. Closely connected to this topic are copyright charms, as they influence what you are allowed to copy from a given text and also limit the applicability of the study aid charms we will be discussing today. Take out your quills, and let’s get started! 

Copyright Charms

Before discussing copyright charms, we will need to focus on what copyright is.  Copyright, at its most basic, is a legal right that attributes a work to its creator. The creator is the only one who can decide whether his or her work may be used by third parties and, if yes, under what conditions. It is nothing palpable, as it does not refer to, for example, a particular printed version of a book, play, screenplay, or other creative material, but is in fact a matter of intellectual property. Every book that is around you has been written by some author, every play by some playwright. In the wizarding world, all of these items are protected by copyright charms referring to their original creator. Even in the Muggle world, copyright exists. While their laws state that copyright expires anywhere from 50 to 100 years after the original creator’s death, depending on the laws of the country where the work was created, the magical equivalent is much harder to understand. Copyright can be granted to either a single person or a family name. The latter practice is most common, as it means that the duration of a copyright will expire only 70 years after a line has gone extinct. 

While the Muggle world has to rely on courts of law, the magical world has better ways of ensuring that people cannot copy work that they are not permitted to. These precautions make it impossible for you to copy an entire book by any means, magical or mundane. When we were discussing the Doubling Charm in Lesson Three, I remember some of you discussing that it would be much cheaper if you could simply use the Doubling Charm on an older student’s book instead of purchasing your school books at Flourish and Blotts’ every year. Thankfully, all of your parents are aware of the serious consequences of attempting to copy an entire book and are diligent in purchasing your school supplies for you in an appropriate manner. The copyright charms of the Ministry of Magic work similar to the Trace in that they are a set of charms that permeate the country, though the enchantment is centred on all written works rather than underage witches and wizards. If the spells detect a breach of copyright, they will set off consequences. Naturally, to prevent people from circumventing these enchantments, their details are kept secret. Attempting to duplicate, or otherwise create a permanent copy of, an entire book simply will not work. Instead of creating a copy of the book, you would only create a great puff of orange smoke. That by itself would not be too bad, but the smoke would start seeping into the offender’s skin. Note that the offender does not necessarily need to be the person casting the Doubling Charm; as always, magic is intent-based, so if you were to pressure someone else into copying a book, you would have to face the consequences. Additionally, the book would become unreadable due to the copyright infringement. This would not only pertain to the offender, but to everyone who attempts to read it. The consequences of a single attempt at copyright would not be too bad, however, after multiple offenses, your skin will start turning more and more orange. This colouring is permanent and not concealable, even with charms more advanced than the Concealer Charm you learned in your third year. The counter-charm is - supposedly - only available to members of the Ministry of Magic, a secret guarded by secrecy spells. The counter-charm reveals your natural skin tone as well as the nature of your copyright infringements to the ministry official, resulting in a hefty fine. It also reverts the original books to a readable status, so for those of you who are thinking about pranking our librarian - don’t. 

While copying certain parts of a book is perfectly fine - you already do this when citing works in your essays - it is copying an entire work that will get you in trouble, and/or not including proper referencing. In the wizarding world, there is no concrete rule as to how much of a book may be copied without violating copyright, but a rule of thumb is that for one written work of your own, it should be no more than ten pages or five percent of the book you are referencing, whichever is lower. While this may seem like a large amount that may be copied, please keep in mind that everything you copy from that particular book counts towards that total - any citation, any reference, any spell block you decide to copy down. Ten pages may seem to be a lot, but research papers and books tend to be considerably longer than Hogwarts essays. I am certain that you will have noticed that your assignments have become considerably harder as you progress through the years, and as the lengths of your essays increase, so do the number of citations that you include. Imagine you were to write an analysis of the Tale of the Three Brothers: as the tale is but 400 words long, five percent is as little as twenty words. It would be very easy to overstep that minimum allowed amount. In these cases, it is advisable to contact the author via the Ministry, as exceptions can be granted on a case by case basis. I see that I have made a few of you quite concerned about your skin tone, but please do not worry! For a single essay, you will never need to copy more than 5% of your textbook - nor should you, as you will receive no credit for it, as some of you have found out already. Keep in mind that magic is based on intent: if you were to cite random parts of a book with the aim to create a copy, you will trigger the enchantment even if it is throughout separate essays.  Additionally, simply writing something down for your own reference, as in the case of class notes, the magic is smart enough to know that this is not a true case of copyright. 

Study Aids 

When writing an essay, you must pay attention to many factors, such as length, content, and citations. Today we will look at three spells that will be able to provide you with some magical assistance for your writing. You may ask yourselves why these helpful spells are not covered until Year Six - after all, you have been writing essays for many years already - but alas, magic cannot always be there to hold your hand. Learning the hard way prepares you better for the future. For example, in the Muggle world it helps you naught, as you know well by now. Additionally, the concentration required for these spells make it harder for younger students to manage them successfully. 

First of all, referencing and citing. You all use outside sources and are required to cite them properly in a bibliography. I am sure most of you will agree that creating one can be tedious work. The referencing spell can help you there, creating a complete bibliographic reference. That said, you will need to copy the information that the spell provides to you onto your parchment.

The effects of the spell are similar to the fiery writing of the Flagrate Charm. The downside is that your writing will not be permanent, no matter how much willpower you put into it. The maximum duration that has been achieved so far is 63 seconds, while the average wizard or witch usually reaches about 49 seconds. This is not enough time to write down all of the information provided by the spell - unless you are very quick at writing or have a very good memory. Casting the spell more than once is certainly doable, so do not worry if you do not manage to copy all necessary information on the first go. 

Referencing Spell
Incantation:	Perscriptiogripha (pur-SCRIP-see-oh-GREE-fah)
Wand Movement:	A book shape: start at the top left corner and move counter-clockwise, forming the shape of a downwards pointing chevron.
Willpower:	Medium; determines the length that your bibliography information remains visible.
Concentration:	Medium to high; on the proper formatting of your bibliography entry as well as the information that you know already. The more information you know, the less concentration will be needed.

Another challenge that many of you have faced, especially when preparing for your O.W.L. examinations, is having to laboriously search through copious amounts of notes just to find some specific incantation or phrase, right? As rereading notes is a great way to review information, we do not teach our next spell, the Keyword Search Charm, until Year Six. The effect of this charm, as the name may already tell you, is that it searches for a given word or phrase in a given text. Before we cover the details of the effect, let us take a look at the spell block.

The Keyword Search Charm is a dynamic spell that requires you to hold your concentration for the entire time that the spell is in effect. If your intended keyword is included in the notes, the first mention of it will be opened, and if this mention is not the one you are looking for, you can recast the spell to continue searching the rest of your notes. As there are a lot of words on a page of notes, the word that you are looking for will glow. You will definitely be unable to miss it. If you are looking for a word that is not included in the data you are searching, your notes will open to the very last page, however nothing will glow. While I see many excited eyes here, the Keyword Search Charm is hard to cast on a large volume of notes. It is a good practice, but do not expect too much of yourselves already! 

There are certain limitations on the types of texts on which you can use this spell, however. Most magical books tend to work well, however those printed by non-magical publishers tend to be more complicated and usually do not work. When it comes to handwritten notes, some pieces of the notes that you are taking right now will work while others definitely will not. 

This rule may seem rather random, so let us take a look at the details. First of all, printed books: magical books are printed by magical publishers, the most well-known being Obscurus Books of Diagon Alley. If you have ever seen a magical printing press, there should be no doubt in your mind that it is an enchanted object. Due to this, there is a certain amount of magic involved in getting a word printed. The ink that is used differs as well. Non-magical ink often contains artificial chemicals, whereas the ink used to print our textbooks, as well as the ink that you are dipping your quills in now, is based on only natural materials. Similarly, writing with a quill - an organic object, using a natural ink - infuses a bit of magic in the text that you are producing as you are writing it. If you are writing with a glitter ballpoint pen, as some of you do, this will not be the case: the chemicals in the ink and the artificial material of the quill substitute do not hold the magic sufficiently for our keyword search to work. To sum it up, you need a natural ink applied by hand - something that will allow the writer’s magic to infuse the text. Once you cast the Keyword Search Charm, it will anchor itself on this magic and otherwise fail.

For the last charm of the year, I would like to present you with one that is commonly known as “the librarians’ best friend,” but may prove to be handy for you to know as well.

 As you may have guessed from the spellcasting components, the Alphabetising Charm arranges books alphabetically. In terms of casting the spell, the part that most people wonder about is the concentration component: why do we need medium concentration when it is only the alphabet that we need to concentrate on? I am sure that all of you know the alphabet. Naming all letters in the correct order is no problem at all - but try to do it backwards. Tell me which letter is before P, or decide which is the correct alphabetical order of the words state, stamp, start, and stage - in less than a second. With a vast amount of materials to shelve properly, I am sure you can see the benefit for librarians to be able to quickly shuffle books into the correct order - as long as they mind their head and do not get hit by flying books.

This concludes all of the new information I will be giving you today. Please remember to review these spells for your final exam. To help you prepare for it, there is a short quiz on this information. Before you finish your last Charms lesson, however, let us do a quick review of what we talked about this year.

Review

In Lesson One, you received some information on what to expect in this N.E.W.T. level course as well as some information about career options. You spoke with various guests, which hopefully helped you to get an idea about your future careers. 

Lesson Two featured charms related to motion. We covered Mobilicorpus, Arresto Momentum, Reverto Momentum, Ascendio and Carpe Retractum, and the limitations of the dream to fly. 

The third lesson of Charms dealt with some non-traditional approaches to explaining magic, namely using Muggle methods. We discussed five charms and how they work: Suppletum, Dornröschen and its counter Revivescito, Somnambulatio, and Geminio. 

In our fourth lesson we covered the biggest and probably most important concept of Year Six: non-verbal spellcasting. We talked about how to start casting non-verbally, why certain spells should not be attempted verbally, and the fact that the nature of a nonverbal spell does not mean that there is no necessity for an incantation. You started practicing Tabulabrado, Aulaeaclaude, and Aulaeaperi. Thinking back to that lesson, casting nonverbally has become a bit easier by now, has it not? 

Lesson Five introduced you to the world of secrecy. While we briefly discussed reasons for secrecy, our main focus was on spells: Obscurefacio, Albesco, Condidicarmen, Incanteficus Commeabilitum and its variations, Adulta Commeabilitum and Femina Commeabilitum, Celavi, Inmobullio, Cartadsigno, and Abolitio.

In Lesson Six, our focus was on theory that you also covered in Transfiguration, namely the distinction between charms and transfigurations. We analysed these differences in more depth with the three spells Acertum Converte, Aguamenti, and Adepede. 

Lessons Seven and Eight introduced you to actually enchanting objects. We covered the theory of spellcasting webs and what you need to consider before attempting to enchant an object, including its materials. In Lesson Eight, you eventually enchanted your very first object, a small Quidditch badge. From the noise level during last weekend’s match, I am certain that most of your projects were successful. 

Finally, today in Lesson Nine we focused on copyright charms as well as study aids. 

If you have any questions, please send me a message before attempting to take your final exam. I would hate it if you lost some points due to a misunderstanding, but be aware that I will deduct points regardless of whether you meant the correct thing or not, you have to actually write it down. I will leave you all to study and wish you the best of luck for your final. You have worked hard during your classes this year, so I am sure that you will succeed now as well. 

Professor Cassandra Virneburg

Image sources: here and here.