Plagiarism charges ‘untrue’: Potter publishers

'Harry Potter' publishers Bloomsbury,who has been sued by the estate of a late British author,on Wednesday,dismissed the plagiarism charges as "unfounded,unsubstantiated and untrue".

‘Harry Potter’ publishers Bloomsbury,who has been sued by the estate of a late British author,on Wednesday,dismissed the plagiarism charges as “unfounded,unsubstantiated and untrue”. The estate of late British author Adrian Jacob is suing J K Rowling and her publisher for 500 million pounds. The family alleges that Rowling’s fourth book ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ has used segments from the late author’s story ‘Willy the Wizard’,which also revolves around the theme of a child discovering his magical powers. Jacob’s book was published in 1987.

According to the family,which includes his son and grandson,Jacob sent the manuscript to Christopher Little,the literary agent at Bloomsbury Publishing who went on to represent Rowling,but it was rejected. Jacob’s book was later published by a smaller company under the title The Adventures Of Willy The Wizard No 1: Livid Land’,Daily Mail reported.

However,a statement from the publishing house has dismissed the allegations as ‘untrue’. “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,” the statement said.

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“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 statement further said. It is not for the first time that J K Rowling,who made a fortune with her boy wizard story,has faced plagiarism charges. Rowling was earlier accused of stealing the idea from author Nancy Stouffer’s book “The Legend Of RAH And The Muggles”,which had common words like “muggles” and “Larry Potter”.

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