Publisher of 'Harry Potter' denies plagiarism

FFJJackson

09:59 PMJul 15 2009

If anybody should have sued J.K. Rowling it should have been Charles Dickens! She rips him off so badly...Harry Potter is nothing but "Oliver Twist" with a magic wand...and Nearly-Headless Nick's "Death Day" buffet table with the rotted food and rats crawling over it? RIGHT OUT OF "GREAT EXPECTATIONS".

ArthurOPodd

09:27 PMJul 15 2009

Pratchett's "Discworld" series is played as parody of earlier fantasy works and even mythology. Discworld is flat. It sails through space on the back of a giant turtle. Magic is so ubiquitous that cameras work by tiny painters who portray the subject in seconds. The Parody aspect of Discworld may be the only reason it has escaped accusations of plagarism itself. There are no grounds for plagarism here, and I have my doubts about Jacobs. My understanding is that similar ideas aren't enough. You can write about a baby space alien who is adopted by humans, but you don't infringe on "Superman" unless the baby comes from the planet Krypton.

Battlerooster14

01:49 PMJul 10 2009

The whole series is based on "Lifted ' Ideas

Flamezfan

09:03 AMJul 06 2009

And here lies a problem with writing, there are only so many ideas and ways to do things before they are repeated. I personally dabble in sci-fi writing and there are only so many ways to make a believable story using faster than light travel. Same thing here, there are only so many ways you can incoporate a magic into modren day.

Fran Platt

02:42 PMJul 05 2009

There are quite a few books predating the Harry Potter series containing material that's WAY too similar to be coincidental. Check out "The Secret of Platform 13" by Eva Ibbotson or "Wizard's Hall" by Jane Yolen (where the classroom doors keep moving around & the hero makes friends with a red-haired kid with a smudge on his nose on his first day of school) & you'll see what I mean. JKR even lifted material from Monty Python (Cockroach Clusters, a confection sold in Honeyduke's Sweet Shop in Hogsmeade, originated in the "Crunchy Frog" sketch). How much does it matter, when she did such a fabulous job of putting all the "borrowed" bits together into a coherent & unbelievably detailed & convincing whole? Maybe not much; but it would be gracious of her at least to admit which works she used as "inspiration."

GREENESPET

11:58 AMJun 16 2009

No one lives in a vacuum. Similarities in popular fiction are common. But if real plagiarism were involved a fact checker would have caught it before too long. I've never heard of Terry Pratchett. Are these children's books? How is books on chains fighting for their readers similar to Hogwarts?

JoeOmar

09:47 AMJun 16 2009

I don't know about this Adrian Jacobs guy, but it's pretty common knowledge that JK lifted many of her ideas from other authors. Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series featured a wizard university called "Unseen University" with a library of books on chains that fought their readers; it's all suspiciously similar to Hogwarts. Pratchett btw is Britain's SECOND best-selling author (behind JK). Not a coincidence.