J.K. Rowling Accused of Plagiarism

Posted on June 15, 2009

Here we go again. Yet another author (well in this case his estate) is suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism. Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury are being sued for allegedly copying "substantial parts" of a book written in 1987 by Adrian Jacobs called The Adventures of Willy the Wizard -- No 1 Livid Land. Bloomsbury and Rowling deny the charges.

It [the lawsuit] added that the plot of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire copied elements of the plot of Willy the Wizard, including a wizard contest, and that the Potter series borrowed the idea of wizards traveling on trains.
"Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures," the estate statement said. "It is alleged that all of these are concepts first created by Adrian Jacobs in Willy the Wizard, some 10 years before J.K. Rowling first published any of the Harry Potter novels and 13 years before Goblet of Fire was published."
According to the statement, Jacobs had sought the services of literary agent Christopher Little who later became Rowling's agent. Jacobs died "penniless" in a London hospice in 1997, it said. In its response, Bloomsbury said Rowling "had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy the Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004, almost seven years after the publication of the first book in the highly publicized Harry Potter series. "Willy the Wizard is a very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution. The central character of Willy the Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school."

Bloomsbury's attorneys said that these same claims were put forward in 2004, but that the plaintiff could not point to one passage in Goblet of Fire that had been lifted from Willy the Wizard. Based on these facts alone, it does not seem like the plaintiff has a case this time either.