By LINTON WEEKS
Is the latest Harry Potter flap a case of plagiarism? Trespassing on intellectual property? Pure coincidence? Writer's pride? You be the judge.
American author Nancy Stouffer claims that J. K. Rowling, British author of the explosively popular Harry Potter books, lifted several names and situations from Stouffer's self-published books in the 1980s, and fobbed them off as her own.
Rowling says she's never heard of Stouffer's books. But Stouffer presses on.
One of Stouffer's titles, for instance, is The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. Rowling also writes of Muggles. Two of Stouffer's characters are Larry and Lilly Potter. Rowling also has characters named Potter: Harry and Lily, with one "l''.
To shut Stouffer up, Rowling and her corporate protectors - Scholastic Books, publisher of four Harry Potter novels in the US, and Time Warner, holder of the super-lucrative cinema and licensing rights to Harry Potter - have filed suit against her in New York.
It's a pre-emptive strike: the corporations don't want Stouffer bad-mouthing the beloved wizard of Hogwarts, especially now that the hyped-to-high-heavens movie version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is scheduled for release in November. And they don't want to be sued by Stouffer for trademark infringement somewhere down the line. But Stouffer, 50, isn't the type to go quietly. She's staging a media McFlurry on TV talk shows and publicising the re-issue of some of her books. In May, Thurman House, a Baltimore publishing company, will bring out The Legend of Rah, featuring, it says, "the Original Muggles''. Four Larry Potter books are also planned.
THERE are vast differences between the two sets of books. Rowling's novels about a young wizard are fully formed tales (the first was 309 pages) bubbling over with imaginative creatures, evolving characters and intricate plot twists.
Stouffer's productions are 24 page activity books: homespun amalgams of stories, pencil games and pictures to color.
There are parallels: Stouffer's Muggles are mutated humanlike creatures left behind on Earth after a nuclear holocaust; Rowling's Muggles are ordinary humans. Rowling writes of a sorcerer's stone, Stouffer of worry stones. The jacket illustration of Legend of Rah resembles Mary Grandpre's familiar renderings of Harry Potter.
Some similarities are remarkable; many are inconsequential. In Stouffer's stories, a character knocks three times on a wooden door; in Rowling's, a character knocks three times on an oak door. Both authors write of a castle on a mirrored lake.
The whole mess ``is hard for me to believe,'' says Stouffer at her home in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. ``For a while I kept everything very quiet. There was danger in going public. I could kill myself in the industry.''
The folks at Scholastic can't believe the whole mess, either - they're amazed anyone is taking Stouffer seriously. To imply that Rowling ``may have stolen some things from Stouffer is offensive'', sighs Scholastic's general counsel, Charles Deull. Such accusations ``are based on a series of statements that are just not true''.
During the mid1980s, Stouffer created several series of activity books, to be sold monthly to teachers and to the public in drugstores and grocery stores. Some 130 books were planned, Stouffer says. Some were printed, some weren't.
Scholastic executives have doubts over the availability of the Legend of Rah. ``We've tried every rarebook store and website,'' says Deull, and couldn't find a used copy for sale.
In the late1980s, Stouffer says, licensing agreements were flooding in at such a rate that she projected annual earnings of $US1 billion ($2 billion). During a two-and-a-half week period, her company received orders for $US6.5 million ($13.2 million) she says. But even with these orders in hand, her company fell apart, she says. She has no records of these because her home studio collapsed during a 1996 snowstorm, explains her attorney, Kevin Casey.
In the 1980s, Stouffer says, she attended trade shows, sometimes setting up shop right next to Scholastic ``with my sixfoottall cutouts of Muggles''.
``That wouldn't make a bit of difference,'' Deull says, ``because Jo Rowling had no contact with us. Scholastic and Time Warner did not create Harry Potter.''
Rowling's first book came to Scholastic as ``a fully formed masterpiece that we outbid other people for. This was not something created by either of us. That's irrelevant,'' Deull says.
Scholastic's editor, Arthur Levine, brought Rowling's books to the US. Stouffer maintains that she met Levine and Levine's wife, who expressed interest in Stouffer's Muggles. Levine has never been married, Deull says, and ``no one at this company ever remembers'' Stouffer.
At another prePottermania point, Stouffer says, Time Warner expressed interest in marketing her books and related Muggles merchandise. In the middle of dissolving her company, she says she couldn't work out a deal.
``There were some negotiations between Warner and her,'' Deull says, ``around the early 1990s. (But) Harry Potter is a 1997 book.'' But nothing ever came of the conversations.
By the time Stouffer decided she was ready to reenter the market with her properties, she says, Warner had signed a licensing agreement with Rowling. And the rest is hysteria.
Now, ``it's impossible for me to market Muggles'', Stouffer says. Stouffer believes that if the cards had been cut another way, much of Rowling's fame and glory might be hers.
In 1997, she and Casey approached Time Warner. ``We were'' says Casey, ``concerned about three aspects: trademark rights in the term Muggles used to sell merchandise, copyright infringement in the illustration of Larry versus Harry Potter, and general unfair competition in the similarities between the books. Those were the three objections we had. These were made known to Scholastic, and their response was to sue us.''
Stouffer, who completed Rah and the Muggles in 1984, says the word comes from her son's babytalk word for cheeks. Rowling says her Muggles came from a British word for fool.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces muggles to the 13th century, when it meant ``tails''. In the 1920s, a pot smoker was called a mugglehead. In the 1930s Louis Armstrong had a song called Muggles. And in 1960 a children's book called The Gammage Cup, featuring a character named Muggles, was a Newbery Award honor book.
For Stouffer to claim any sort of control over the word is ridiculous, Deull says.
Stouffer has waged a trademark war before. In 1992 she objected to the name of a character, Muggle, in Steven Bochco's shortlived animated cartoon series, Capitol Critters.
So what does Stouffer want? She was negotiating with the companies because ``I wanted it stopped or I wanted to be compensated'', she says.
Now she's battling ``the idea that it's OK to take from somebody like me. If I infringed on Time Warner or Scholastic,'' she says, ``they'd be all over me like flies on youknowwhat''.
Sound familiar?
In the creative world, challenges of originality come with the territory. Recently, a jury awarded a large settlement to a high school science teacher in Detroit who claimed that Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1996 movie Jingle All the Way bore a number of striking resemblances to the teacher's unproduced script, sold in 1993, called ``Could This Be Christmas''. A film expert detected 36 similarities between the scripts.
``How many similarities is too many?'' asks Kevin Casey, attorney for Nancy Stouffer, who is crying foul over author J.K. Rowling. Stouffer's website, www.realmuggles.com, lists more than 40 between the two works.
Joseph Heller's 1961 classic, Catch-22, was not dissimilar to Lewis Falstein's 1951 novel, Face of a Hero.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said of plagiarism, ``Every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day, and not merely once or twice, but every time he opens his mouth.'
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