Estate Of Author Who Claims JK Rowling Copied Her Work Sues Again

from the keep-on-suing-on dept

Thu, Jul 15th 2010 5:03pm — Mike Masnick

A year ago, we wrote about the latest (in a decently long line) of authors who claimed that JK Rowling "plagiarized" some other book for her Harry Potter works. The evidence is always pretty much lacking, and the details suggest a failed author who had a book that had a few loose similarities. In this case, the estate of the author sued Bloomsbury, who published the books in the UK. But, apparently, that's not enough. The estate is filing a similar lawsuit in the US, because maybe one of those lawsuits will actually lead to money. Of course, the real likelihood is that this is a weak attempt at using the court systems to try to get attention for a failed book.

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Filed Under: copyright, harry potter, jk rowling, plagiarism

15 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jul 2010 @ 5:21pm

Oh no! This will have devastating chilling effects on the "apprentice wizard" book writing business :P
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frosty840, 15 Jul 2010 @ 5:44pm

Personally, I've always thought that Anthony Horowitz would have had a much stronger case for plagiarism of his book "Groosham Grange", to the extent that I assumed for years that I'd read the first Harry Potter book because I'd read Horowitz's book.

As you point out, though, he doesn't really need the publicity of a spurious plagiarism lawsuit, being fairly well-known.
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MrWilson, 15 Jul 2010 @ 5:49pm

"fairly well-known"
Never heard of him.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jul 2010 @ 6:09pm

Tbh, whenever I hear "estate of author" I immediately think "copyright troll". You REALLY shouldn't be able to inherit copyrights.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jul 2010 @ 6:27pm

Re: "fairly well-known"
now you have
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Hephaestus (profile), 15 Jul 2010 @ 6:28pm

Re:
"be able to inherit copyrights."

Don't worry that's coming to an end soon. I wonder what Mike will do when it does ... ;)
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jul 2010 @ 6:30pm

Re: Re:
He's been ageing champagne for years now.

...unfortunately, it's long past its "mature" date.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jul 2010 @ 6:58pm

Re: Re:
"Don't worry that's coming to an end soon."

Really? Is the world ending or something?
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Richard (profile), 16 Jul 2010 @ 2:05am

Rowling Plagiarism
Rowling has plagiarised just about every preceding children's writer there is. Her books are mainly an amalgam of Jennings, The Lord of the Rings and The Sword in the Stone.

However there is nothing unusual about that. That is how culture develops. (The books I mention as "sources" are themselves all derived from earlier works.)

The main problem is that she has not done a good job of the plagiarism - since her books are all decidedly inferior to her source material in just about every respect.

However to claim that she copied from some unknown author is ridiculous - since she obviously had no need to.
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Anonymous Coward, 16 Jul 2010 @ 3:07pm

Re: Re: Re:
2012. Didn't you get the memo?
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Jul 2010 @ 12:04pm

Well if you woke up and found that Goblet of Fire contained over FORTY themes concepts plots and storylines that came out of your book written thirteen years later-you would sue too! Especially when you note Rowling's reaction-instead of saying "Well I have glanced at this book now and am not surprised given all those similarities" she cries Absurd! Absurd like some angry parrot.-what is absurd is her cavalier treatment in riding roughshod over critics! What is absurd is her story about how she worked out all seven books which came to her in an epiphany on a train! What is absurd is her agent’s denials of his association with Jacobs-Roll on the Court Case that’s what we say! Go Willy Wizard Lawsuit-more power to your writ! see the writ at -trademarklaw/blogs/copyrightandtrademarklawblog/archive/2010/07/16/the-strange-case-of-willy-th e-wizard-versus-harry-potter-allen-v-scholastic-inc-1-10-cv-05335-sdny-july-13-2010.aspx
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Frank Persol, 18 Jul 2010 @ 12:08pm

Jacobs vs Rowling and Scholastic
That was my comment above-sorry missed out my details however you can read the writ online at the \hollywood reporter or lexis nexis to US top Legal pro site.# http://www.lexisnexis.com/Community/copyright-trademarklaw/blogs/copyrightandtrademarklawb log/archive/2010/07/16/the-strange-case-of-willy-the-wizard-versus-harry-potter-allen-v-scholastic-i nc-1-10-cv-05335-sdny-july-13-2010.aspx enjoy-and wake up and smell the plagiarism!
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Jean-Pierre Malisse, 16 Jul 2012 @ 5:47am

Horowitz vs H.P.
Implicitely by not suing Horowitz, J.K. Rowling recognizes that she had used "some" (a lot!) ideas of him to write her book. (I would have liked to have her expressing some tribute to him, as he had wrote his novel, long time before hers ! however I recognize also that she developed the trama much better, and was worth her success)
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eowyn123 (profile), 17 Jan 2017 @ 11:06am

Re: Horowitz vs H.P.
You may want to have a look at my link - in science and in literature, ideas are NOT well protected.
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