Since first coming to wide notice in the late 1990s, the Harry Potter book series by J. K. Rowling has been the subject of a number of legal disputes. Rowling, her various publishers and Time Warner, the owner of the rights to the Harry Potter films, have taken numerous legal actions to protect their copyrights, and also have fielded accusations of copyright theft themselves. The worldwide popularity of the Harry Potter series has led to the appearance of a number of locally-produced, unauthorised sequels and other derivative works, leading to efforts to ban or contain them. While these legal proceedings have countered a number of cases of outright piracy, other attempts have targeted not-for-profit endeavours and have been criticised.
Another area of legal dispute involves a series of injunctions obtained by Rowling and her publishers to prohibit anyone from distributing or reading her books before their official release dates. The sweeping powers of these injunctions have sometimes drawn criticism from civil liberties and free speech campaigners and led to debates over the "right to read". One of these injunctions was used in an unrelated trespassing case as precedent supporting the issuing of an injunction against a John Doe. (kept at: Oxford Center for Higher Education Policy Studies)
Outside these controversies, a number of particular incidents related to Harry Potter have also led, or almost led, to legal action. In 2005, a man was sentenced to four years in prison after firing a replica gun at a journalist during a staged deal for stolen copies of an unreleased Harry Potter novel, and attempting to blackmail the publisher with threats of releasing secrets from the book. Then in 2007 Bloomsbury Publishing contemplated legal action against the supermarket chain Asda for libel after the company accused them of overpricing the final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Allegations of copyright and trademark infringement against Rowling
Nancy Stouffer In 1999, American author Nancy Kathleen Stouffer alleged copyright and trademark infringement by Rowling of her 1984 works The Legend of Rah and the Muggles () and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly. The primary basis for Stouffer's case rested in her own purported invention of the word "Muggles", the name of a race of mutant humanoids in The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and Larry Potter, the title character of a series of activity booklets for children. Larry Potter, like Harry Potter, is a bespectacled boy with dark hair, though he is not a character in The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. Stouffer also drew a number of other comparisons, such as a castle on a lake, a receiving room and wooden doors. Portions of Rah were originally published in booklet form in 1986 by Ande Publishing Company, a company founded by Stouffer together with a group of friends and family.Scholastic, Inc. v. Stouffer 221 F. Supp. 2d 425 (S.D.N.Y. 2002) Ande Publishing filed for bankruptcy in September 1987 without selling any of its booklets in the United States or elsewhere. Rowling has stated that she first visited the United States in 1998. (Rowling interview)
Rowling, along with Scholastic Press (her American publisher) and Warner Bros. (holders of the series' film rights), pre-empted Stouffer in 2002 with a suit of their own seeking a declaratory judgment that they had not infringed on any of Stouffer's works. The court found in Rowling's favour, granting summary judgment and holding that "no reasonable juror could find a likelihood of confusion as to the source of the two parties' works". During the course of the trial, it was held that Rowling proved "by clear and convincing evidence, that Stouffer has perpetrated a fraud on the Court through her submission of fraudulent documents as well as through her untruthful testimony", including changing pages years after the fact to retroactively insert the word "muggle". Her case was dismissed with prejudice and she was fined $50,000 for her "pattern of intentional bad faith conduct" in relation to her employment of fraudulent submissions, as well as being ordered to pay a portion of the plaintiffs' legal fees. Stouffer appealed the decision in 2004, but in 2005 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.Scholastic Inc. v. Stouffer, 81 F. App'x 396 (2d Cir. 2003) In 2006 she stated on her website that she was planning to republish her books and was entertaining the possibility of another lawsuit against Warner Bros., J. K. Rowling and Scholastic Press.
The Legend of Rah and the Muggles is out of print. In early 2001, it was published by Thurman House, LLC, a Maryland publishing company. Thurman House, formed by Ottenheimer Publishers to republish the works of Nancy Stouffer, was closed when Ottenheimer ceased operations in 2002 after filing for bankruptcy. Stouffer later asserted that any copies of the book published by Thurman House are unauthorized because the publisher failed to honour its contractual obligations to her.
The Wyrd Sisters In 2005, Warner Bros. offered CAD$5,000 (later CAD$50,000) to the Canadian folk band the Wyrd Sisters for the rights to use their name in the film version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rowling had written a scene in the novel in which a band called the Weird Sisters appeared at a school dance, and the group owned the rights to the name in Canada. However, the offer was declined, and instead the band undertook a legal action against Warner Bros., as well as Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway of Radiohead, who were to play the band in the film. All plans to use the name in the movie were later abandoned. Despite that decision, the Canadian band filed a CAD$40-million ($39 million) lawsuit against Warner in Ontario court. In connection with the lawsuit, the band brought an interlocutory injunction hoping to prevent the release of the film. The injunction application was dismissed. The entire suit was dismissed in November 2005. In June 2006, an Ontario judge decreed that the band pay Warner Bros. CAD$140,000 in legal costs, describing their lawsuit as "highly intrusive". The group stated that they planned to appeal the decision. Jarvis Cocker initially wished to release an album of "Weird Sisters"-themed music with collaborators including Franz Ferdinand, Jack White and Iggy Pop, but the project was dropped as a result of the lawsuit. The Wyrd Sisters reported death threats from irate Harry Potter fans. As of March 2010, the lawsuit has been settled out of court, the details sealed.
Adrian Jacobs In June 2009, the estate of Adrian Jacobs, a children's author who died in 1997, sued Rowling's publishers, Bloomsbury, for £500 million, accusing her of having plagiarised "substantial parts" of his work in writing the novel Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In a statement, Jacobs's family claimed that a scene in Goblet of Fire was substantially similar to Jacobs's book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land. They also launched a joint suit against Rowling and her publishers. Bloomsbury countered with a statement of its own, saying that "This claim is without merit and will be defended vigorously," and that 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 Harry Potter book." The Jacobs estate, driven by his son and grandson, have published a website with details and excerpts from the book, according to the Toronto Star. In July 2010, the estate filed suit against Rowling's American publisher, Scholastic, demanding that the company burn all copies of Goblet of Fire.
On 6 January 2011, the US lawsuit against Scholastic was dismissed. The judge in the case stated that there was not enough similarity between the two books to make a case for plagiarism. In the UK courts, on 21 March 2011, Paul Allen, a trustee of the Jacobs estate, was ordered to pay as security to the court 65% of the costs faced by Bloomsbury and Rowling, amounting to over £1.5million, to avoid the claim being struck out. It was reported in The BooksellerThe Bookseller Trustee of Willy the Wizard Makes Appeal over Court Costs (29 April 2011) that Paul Allen has appealed against paying this sum. As a condition of the appeal, he paid £50,000 to the court in May 2011.The Bookseller, 24 May 2011 The claim was formally struck out in July 2011 after the deadline for Allen's initial payment was missed.
International publications
In 2002, an unauthorised Chinese-language sequel titled Harry Potter and Bao Zoulong (Chinese: Simplified: 哈利波特与豹走龙, Traditional: 哈利波特與豹走龍, Hanyu Pinyin: Hālì Bōtè yǔ Bào Zǒulóng) appeared for sale in the People's Republic of China. (In English-language media this was mistranslated as Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon.) According to translated excerpts, the book principally consists of the text of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, but with most names changed to those of Harry Potter characters. The book was quickly recognised by media outlets as a fake. Rowling and Warner Bros. took steps to stop its distribution. Copies were briefly distributed around the world, including e-book copies traded on the Internet. In November 2002, the Bashu Publishing House, in the southwestern city of Chengdu, agreed to pay a £1,600 fine and publish an apology in China's Legal Times for printing and distributing the novel.Legal magic spells win for Harry in China Oliver August and Jack Malvern, The Times, 2002-11-02 Retrieved on: 2007-09-25 As of 2007, the identity of the anonymous author had not been discovered. The opening of Harry Potter and Bao Zoulong, translated into English, was included in several news articles. As of 2007, it is estimated that there are fifteen million copies of fraudulent Harry Potter novels circulating in China, among them titles such as Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll (otherwise known as Harry Potter and Ciwawa), Harry Potter and the Filler of Big, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Relative Prince, and Harry Potter and the Golden Armor. In 2007, Rowling's agents, the Christopher Little Literary Agency, began to discuss the possibility of legal proceedings concerning a fake version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that appeared in China ten days before the actual book's publication.
In 2003, legal pressure from Harry Potters publishers led an Indian publisher to stop publication of Harry Potter in Calcutta by Uttam Ghosh; a work in which Harry meets figures from Bengali literature.Wu, Tim. "Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright." Slate. Friday 27 June 2003. Retrieved 11 May 2009. The case was settled out of court.
Also in 2003, courts in the Netherlands prevented the distribution of a Dutch translation of Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, the first of Dmitri Yemets' popular Russian series about a female apprentice wizard. Rowling and her publishers sued, arguing that the Grotter books violate copyright law. Yemets and his original Moscow-based publishers, Eksmo, argued that the books constitute a parody, permitted under copyright. The Dutch courts ruled that the books did not constitute parody and thus were not allowed to be sold in the Netherlands. Later that year, as the Dutch translation Tanja Grotter en de magische contrabas was still legal in Belgium, the Flemish publishers Roularta Books decided to print 1,000 copies (and no more) in order to let people decide whether it was plagiarism, hoping that under those circumstances Rowling and her publishers would not sue.'Tanja Grotter' wel in België te lezen , Nieuws.nl, 2003-09-25. Retrieved on 2008-09-25 (in Dutch) Rowling did not sue, and the book, which Dutch people could buy by postal order from another Flemish publisher, Boekhandel VanIn, soon sold out. The books continue to be published in Russia and have spawned several sequels. (in Russian)