The Court credited evidence that Stouffer’s book in the 1980’s was originally entitled simply “ Rah,” and that only later did she add the words “The Legend of” and “the Muggles” in order to bolster her court case. But when it was done with that infringement analysis, the Court dropped the assumption and really let Stouffer have it. The Court conducted its infringement analysis under the assumption that Stouffer in fact did author the works she claimed to have authored at the times she claimed to have authored them. In 2002, the Court in granted summary judgment to Scholastic, finding that Rowling’s use of the term “muggles” to refer to ordinary human beings was unlikely to be confused with Stouffer’s “Muggles,” who were “tiny hairless creatures with elongated heads who live in a fictional, post-apocalyptic land.” As to the ‘Larry = Harry’ allegation, the Court held that the fact that two boys with brown hair were wearing glasses was not sufficient to create a likelihood of confusion for trademark purposes or a substantial similarity for copyright purposes. Scholastic filed an action in the Southern District of New York, seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement. Stouffer alleged that the Harry Potter books infringed her copyrights and trademarks in a number of ways, including because one of Stouffer’s books had a race of beings called “ Muggles,” and another had a protagonist whose name rhymed with Harry Potter and who wore glasses. publisher, in which she claimed to have authored books in the 1980’s entitled The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly. Scholastic: In 1999, just after the first Harry Potter book was released in the United States, American author Nancy Stouffer started writing letters to Scholastic, Rowling’s U.S. Or perhaps, as Ginny Weasley once opined, it’s because “you sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.” Rowling has never been anything but vindicated, so why were these cases brought in the first place? Perhaps Harry Potter is like the Mirror of Erised, in which potential plaintiffs see what they want to see. From the time Harry Potter was first published, the books have been challenged by other artists who contend that they - not Rowling - are responsible for all or part of the magic. Nothing breeds intellectual property lawsuits like success. To commemorate this semi-centennial, we have created this guide to the most notable and interesting of the Harry Potter legal disputes. Rowling and her works pop up in court more than any author since Charles Dickens - and that’s saying something considering that Dickens, unlike Rowling, wrote books about lawyers. The franchise has kept dozens if not hundreds of lawyers busy with precedent-setting copyright cases, trademark disputes, First Amendment battles over religious expression, and even the occasional breaking and entering. The enormous success of Rowling’s literary creation and its associated multimedia empire has spawned countless jealousies, countless imitators, countless parodists and countless pirates.
Rowling celebrates her 50th birthday, according to muggle sources. On July 31, 2015, Harry Potter author J.K.