He's basically trying to help promote the non-profit he is working at which makes sense, not for his own monetary gain.

It's the equivalent of Stephen Colbert saying he'll do something silly if people help raise x amount of money for y charity.

The actual fundraising bribe is a 6/5/4/3 day release schedule for $0/50000/750000/125000 SIAI donation challenge. Not holding chapters hostage or anything, as I was first afraid of.

Here at the Singularity Institute, our motto is "Be less evil than Google."

This seems a little dangerous. Does this seem like monetizing fanfiction containing copyrighted characters in a non-direct way to anyone else?

I do like the story so far, and I'd hate for it to go poof because of legal issues.

Only the release timeline would change, by a few days, not the writing or the releasing at all. But I am not a "copyright" lawyer.

Copyright law doesn't care about whether this is "monetizing" or not. He's infringing simply by using JK Rowling's characters; he's safe only thanks to JK Rowling saying that she doesn't mind HP fanfiction as long as it's not obscene and non-commercial.

So the only real question here is: What does JK Rowling think of this?

She supports fanfiction but it has to be non-commercial. See eg http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3753001.stm

Sure. My point is, this is all based on her whims, not on any legal definitions. So "non-commercial" in this context just means whatever JK Rowling wants it to mean in this context.

Given that it's raising money for a charities, and that the donations only accelerate the publication rate, I would be surprised to see Rowling object when she hasn't objected to previous chapters.

Frustrating: I've been trying for 15 minutes now to make a donation. First, I had to search to find where to make a donation since the announcement didn't include a link. Then the Google Checkout button did not work. Then causes.com sat frozen for over 3 minutes the for getting me a message that there was an unspecified problem with my card. it's a good cause and a great work of fiction so I'm willing to try 1 more time.

It seems that fanfiction.net doesn't allow links in the body text of books. I hope this is the correct link: http://singinst.org/donate/

I think it's this: http://singinst.org/2011summerchallenge

I donated, but that's simply because I'm an incredible fan of the work (and most of his writing) - I figure it's my way of 'supporting' him. Wonder if this counts as 'monetizing?

Dedicating my donation to the 'The Stanford Prison Experiment' sequence.