Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series
The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling have engendered a number of legal disputes since their publication. Civil liberties and free speech campaigners have decried certain actions taken by Rowling and her publishers, asserting that they and Time Warner have been needlessly overzealous in defence of copyright. Other legal disputes have drawn more sympathy for Rowling, particularly her defence against an author's fraudulent claim of copyright and trademark infringement, and in her attempts to stop illegally copied or counterfeit versions of her works from being sold. In other cases, attempts to preserve the secrecy over the plots of future books have led to a much-contested legal injunction and even to a criminal conviction. Bloomsbury Publishing also came close to 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
Nancy Stouffer
In 1999, American onetime author Nancy Stouffer quietly began to allege 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.[1]
The primary basis for Stouffer's case rests in her own purported invention of the word "Muggles", non-magical elongated humanoids of sorts, in The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and Larry Potter, the title character of a series of activity booklets for children. Larry Potter is a bespectacled boy with dark, wavy hair. Rowling's Potter is characterised as having all of those qualities, though with unruly instead of wavy hair. Despite the confused reports of some news sites,[2] Larry Potter is not a character in The Legend of Rah and the Muggles; Stouffer contended, and still does to this day, that it is "the cumulative effect of all of it combined" with the other comparisons she lists on her website.[3] Stouffer's books were only available for sale in the eastern United States between 1986 and 1987, and none were sold.[4] Rowling has stated that she first visited the United States in 1998.[5]
Rowling, along with Scholastic Press (her American publisher) and Warner Bros. (holders of the series' film rights), pre-empted Stouffer with a suit of their own seeking a declaratory judgment that they had not infringed on any of Stouffer's works. During the course of the trial, it was proven "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,"[4] including changing pages years after the fact to retroactively insert the word "muggle".[4][6]
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, along with being ordered to pay a portion of the plaintiffs' legal fees.[7] Stouffer appealed the decision in 2004, but the appeals court upheld the ruling, stating that "no reasonable juror could find a likelihood of confusion as to the source of the two parties' works".[
Claire Field
In 2000, in the lead-up to the release of the first Harry Potter film, Warner Bros., the film's distributor, sent a series of threatening letters to owners of Harry Potter fansites, demanding that, to protect their copyright, they hand over their domain names. The action resulted in negative publicity for the company when Claire Field, the then 15-year-old webmaster of the British fansite harrypotterguide.co.uk, was reduced to tears by what were described by her father as unnecessary bully tactics. Eventually the corporation backed down in the face of media opposition and declared that, as the site was non-commercial, it didn't violate their trademark
Various Chinese publishing houses
In 2002, an unauthorised Chinese-language sequel entitled Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon appeared for sale in the People's Republic of China. The work of a Chinese ghostwriter, the book contains the verbatim text of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and characters from the works of other authors, including the title character from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Rowling's lawyers successfully took legal action against the publishers, who were forced to pay damages.[10] Also in 2002, the China Braille Publishing House published Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll. It is estimated that there are fifteen million phoney Harry Potter novels circulating in China today.[11] In 2007, Christopher Little, Rowling's literary agents, 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
Dimitry Yemets
In 2003, courts in the Netherlands prevented the distribution of a Dutch translation of Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, the first of Dimitry Yemets' popular Russian series about a female apprentice wizard, Tanya Grotter. 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 translated or sold outside Russia.[12][13]
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.[14] Rowling did not sue, but as there was a lot of interest in the book (Dutch people could buy the book by postal order from another Flemish publisher, Boekhandel VanIn) it was soon sold out.
The books remain popular in Russia and have spawned several sequels, as well as numerous merchandise and adaptations
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You can find a lot more info about this at the following Wikipedia link:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series
