The lawsuit, which was filed last year, has been filed by the estate of the late Adrian Jacobs and claims that Rowling copied certain elements of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” from Jacobs’ book, “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard – No 1 Livid Land”, which was written in 1987. At the time the suit was filed, Rowling’s British publisher Bloomsbury issued this statement:
JK 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 publicised Harry Potter series – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and after the publication of the first five books in the 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. This claim was first made in 2004 by solicitors in London acting on behalf of Adrian Jacobs’ son who was the representative of his father’s estate and who lives in the United States. The claim was unable to identify any text in the Harry Potter books which was said to copy Willy the Wizard. This claim is without merit and will be defended vigorously.
The estate of Adrian Jacobs also filed suit against Rowling’s U.S. publisher, Scholastic, earlier this year, demanding that the company burn all copies of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”
The Harry Potter 7-volume series has sold over 400 million copies since the release of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in 1997. The final book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, was released to great fanfare in July 2007, selling over 8 million copies in the first 24 hours of its release.
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