J.K. Rowling Stole My Idea, Too!

Generally speaking, I am not fond of plagiarism. But let's be honest with ourselves; if you're going to accuse one of the most successful authors in the world of stealing your ideas, that's tantamount to filing a frivolous lawsuit.

I'm speaking here, of course, about the lawsuit that was recently brought against J.K. Rowling, the celebrated author of the Harry Potter series, by the estate of English children's author Adrian Jacobs. Rowling's name was added as a defendant in a lawsuit against her publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, and her her agent, Christopher Little, who, coincidentally, was also Jacobs' agent.

The suit alleges that Rowling stole concepts such as "wizard contests, wizard prisons, wizard hospitals, and wizard colleges--from his 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: No. 1 Livid Land and used them in writing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," writes Marjorie Kehe in her Feb. 18, 2010, Christian Science Monitor article, "J.K. Rowling faces another plagiarism suit."

Let me be the first to say that I have yet to read The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: No. 1 Livid Land. Rowling hasn't read it either, so she says. But even if she had read the book and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire did bear strikingly similar characteristics to it, does that warrant Jacobs' estate coming away from this lawsuit as a winner?

This lawsuit that was filed against Rowling got me to thinking, though, about clear-cut plagiarism cases in which offenders should definitely be punished. Take the case of New York Times reporter Zachary Kouwe, for example, who, according to a Feb. 17, 2010, FOXBusiness report, resigned after being outed for plagiarizing on more that one occasion. (The straw that broke the camel's back in that case was, apparently, a letter from the Wall Street Journal to the Times pointing out several similarities between a story that was posted on the Journal's Web site and one written by Kouwe that was published in the Times.)

Then there was 2008 Harvard graduate Kaavya Viswanathan, whose book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, contains, among others, a 14-word passage that appears verbatim in Megan F. McCafferty’s book, Sloppy Firsts.

And of course who can forget Vice President Joe Biden's exit from the 1988 presidential election, which was due to (yep, you guessed it) PLAGIARISM. Biden lifted his then-stump speech from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. At first, Biden attributed Kinnock when he quoted him, but he didn't continue to do so, and this ultimately led to him dropping out of the race.

I suppose I just don't understand why it is that people can't be more original with what they're writing or saying. Are we really all just less creative now than we used to be? Because I really don't think so. I think we're just far lazier. It's so much easier to copy and paste than to actually, dare I say, work to accomplish something.

But if you're the author of some book from which passages have been cut and pasted into another? Well then, sue the bastards, because you've got every right to do so.

And now I must return to my manuscript: Barry Crotcher and the Full Blood King.