Is 'Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire' A Rip-Off Of 'Willy The Wizard'? Author's Estate Sues Scholastic

The Bookseller:

The lawsuit, to be filed in a federal court in New York, claims that the company's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is "substantially similar" to Jacob's 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, a book largely unknown before last year. The suit calls for Scholastic to recall the Goblet books and pay the estate all profit from it.

Read the whole story: The Bookseller

Comments

[RGKahn]

11:07 PM on 07/16/2010

Yes! It is the Reader's Digest version of the 600 page book Harry Potter finale. It is the same, word for word, as the 20 page literary masterpiece called "The Adventures of Willy the Wizard". Which we all know has been translated into 50 languages and made in several movies and t.v. series. All in the mind of the heirs to the writer of The Adventures of Willy the Wizard.

[swollen ostrich]

09:12 AM on 07/15/2010

I find it interesting that the Willy The Wizard website seems specifically designed, not to sell books (although there is a link for that), but to influence the visitor into believing the ridiculous lawsuit.

The website is basically a whole list of ideas in the Harry Potter books, each of which link to a quote from the Willy the Wizard book.

Just an example - the link for "Brewing Village" mentions nothing like Butter Beer, but, and I quote here: "They were all happy and had no desire to return to their boring lives in Hopdania, where they had been engaged in brewing"

The hilarious thing is that each quote from Willy the Wizard has highlighted, in bold and italics, the text that they believe to be similar to the Harry Potter books.

Looking at the links, the "similarities" are so inconsequential and tangential that, based on their website, I may have a case to sue everyone involved with Harry Potter myself, seeing as I have 2 big toes, and so does the Harry Potter character!

[niceguysneverfinish]

04:29 PM on 07/14/2010

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is where to look for her influences.

[ESerafina42]

10:50 AM on 07/14/2010

The idea that a "very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution" was "plagiarized" into a 700-page book is laughable, whatever the similarities.

[RedDogBear]

11:24 AM on 07/14/2010

I agree and I would bet they know it as well. Probably hoping for some kind of out of court settlement to make them just go away.

[ESerafina42]

01:08 PM on 07/14/2010

If I were the publisher I'd let it go to court and ask the judge to dismiss it as a frivolous lawsuit, incidentally making them pay my costs.

[FBuchan]

12:58 PM on 07/14/2010

When you see the progression she laid throughout the series, it is just impossible to not consider the forth book as part of the whole, meaning it is even less likely she had ever heard of the book it allegedly copied. You can even dislike the series and have to eventually admit she knew where she was headed from the outset.

Then again, thematically, you could make a case she plagiarized parts of the Bible, or Shakespeare, and plenty of Greek mythology. But then, so did everyone else. Maybe the author's estate doing the suing should have to submit to a lawsuit from Zeus. Such nonsense.

[ESerafina42]

01:11 PM on 07/14/2010

Yes, I had a friend who, while she liked it, thought that Rowling stole the "giant spider" (actually Acromantula) from Tolkien, but I pointed out to her that she would then have to think that Tolkien "stole" it from L. Frank Baum, who had them in The Wizard of Oz, and so on back. There are certain things that show up over and over in literature and folklore, and as long as you do something original with them, it doesn't qualify as plagiarism.

So silly!