J.K. Rowling Charged With Plagiarism—Again
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/19/2009
Harry Potter’s being dragged into court again, this time by the estate of Adrian Jacobs, a British children’s book author who died in 1997. His family is suing J. K. Rowling’s British publisher Bloomsbury for plagiarism.
Their claim? That Rowling borrowed heavily from a scene in Jacob’s novel The Adventures of Willy the
Front cover of the 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard by Adrian Jacobs.
Wizard: Livid Land (Bachman and Turner, 1987) for her book Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire (Arthur A. Levine Bks., 2003), stating that both Willy and Harry must decipher a major task in a contest while in a bathroom with help from magical creatures.
Bloomsbury has denied the claim, while Jacobs’ family is pursuing the suit in London High Court and considering adding Rowling to the suit.
This is not the first time Rowling has been pursued by writers claiming she plagiarized work. One of the better-known cases involves a suit brought by Nancy Stouffer about her two stories, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles (Thurman House, 2001) and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly (Thurman House, 2001), where a character named Larry Potter appears with a physical resemblance to Harry Potter. Stouffer lost her case in 2002 and an appeal three years later.
But Rowling herself has aggressively fought unauthorized use of her work including her success at halting the print publication of an online reference guide, the Harry Potter Lexicon, in 2008.
In many of these cases, courts must determine what is fair use—and what might be outright copying. But even then, there are times when the courts may permit exact wording.
“There’s an opening in the monopoly of copyright,” says Carrie Russell, director of the Program on Public Access to Information for the American Library Association’s Washington office. “If people had a complete monopoly you would have to ask the holder for everything, even to quote from the book in a paper. It would restrict creativity.”
Given the success of Rowling’s Potter series it seems unlikely that she’ll stop being a lightning rod for suits of this nature. While her stories are hugely popular, they do mirror many archetypes and story arcs found in popular tales. After all, the idea of an elder wizard leading his charges to safety certainly appears, for example, in Harry Potter’s adventures. But it does as well in The Fellowship of the Ring (George Allen & Unwin, 1954) by J. R. R. Tolkien, and of course in the tales of King Arthur and Merlin.
The success of the Jacobs’ family will be based on how well they can show Rowling specifically pulled from his book. “The burden is on [the family],” says Russell. “They have to prove it’s been stolen by her.”
