JK Rowling sued for plagiarism

Frank PersolJun 21st, 2009 - 09:50:47

Bloomsbury say the book is small and the claims 'unsubstantiated'
On the website for the book www.willythewizard.com as well as the plotline (spyrightable) there appear to be many similar concepts to Rowling's Harry Potter work. Wizard College,a Wizard who gambles,wizard hospitals,wizards needing to earn money by inventions. It cannot have been an easy call for Jacobs' estate to sue Bloomsbury and plan to sue Rowling and the English High Court is the place for serious lawsuits.
Rowling always famously maintained that she found Chris Little in some library book and wrote to him by chance with her manuscrip fully formed!
WEll what a remarkeable co-incidence that he should have handled a Wizard book ten years earlier with all those similarities-plotlines,jerking spells,memory loss spells,Wizard Chess played on Wizard trains,Wizards from real countries,the great hall, a nearly headless creature.
I think Bloomsbury and probably some other companies involved in the franchise better make provision for big losses ,or their shareholders will want to know more! Of course they'll just turn on the golden goose Rowling and sue her it turn if it gets proved. This one should run and run!FP

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Elizabeth KernerJun 24th, 2009 - 10:10:29

The problem, of course, is that it is so very difficult to prove ownership of fantasy concepts. The idea of a wizard school has been around forever - in modern fantasy, for decades at least before Rowling was published. It is treated by so many good authors (Diana Wynn Jones, for example) in so many different ways that establishing that one person 'stole' a concept from another is almost impossible.

Now, I have not read the small booklet in question, but I suspect they are going to have an uphill struggle proving anything. For goodness' sake, Dan Brown (pfeh) stole the entire plot, including vast swathes of detail, of the book Holy Blood Holy Grail for his wildly successful DaVinci Code, and those authors lost a completely provable case because of a technicality. To be honest, I don't think that the plaintiffs in this case have a prayer.

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