Long wait for Potter stage shows

Theatregoers will not fall under Harry's spell yet

Theatres have been told they will not be allowed to put Harry Potter on the stage until close to 2007 at the earliest.

Novelist JK Rowling, who created the boy wizard, is said to have been inundated with hundreds of requests for her books to be adapted for the theatre.

But her agent said the rights for dramatisation have not yet been licensed, and are subject to being held back under contract until 2007.

The writer will not enter into any negotiations or consider approving any dramatic rights until "much closer to that time", Christopher Little says.

Richard Harris plays the Hogwarts headmaster

He told The Stage newspaper: "We have had requests every week from all over the world in connection with the stage rights to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

"It would be difficult to give a figure, but it is in the hundreds."

With the Warner Brothers film of Rowling's first novel breaking box office records all over the world, Harry Potter marketing rights are big business.

Media giant

The rights to the books are owned by the world's largest media company, AOL Time Warner.

Last year the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), based in Geneva granted ownership of 107 Potter-related internet domain names to Time Warner - which had yet to merge with the internet giant AOL.

The names - which include harrypotterbooks.org, harrypotterfilm.org and harrypotterstudios.com - had been registered on or around the day the news broke that the first book was to be made into a film.

Time Warner went on to win a legal case against a California-based organisation it accused of "cybersquatting".

The WIPO - which is the closest thing the internet has to a ruling body - ruled that HarperStephens of California, had "no rights or legitimate interests" in the domain names, and had registered them "in bad faith".