THE BRITISH high court has asked the estate of late author Adrian Jacobs, the writer of The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, to deposit more than £1.5 million as security if the plagiarism charges brought by the estate against author J.K. Rowling, famous for her 7-book Harry Potter series, and her publisher Bloomsbury are to continue. The failure to do so will lead the case to be dismissed.
Justice Sir David Kitchin ordered Paul Allen, the trustee of the estate, to make a series of payments into court as security for 65 per cent of the costs faced by Rowling and Bloomsbury. The court ordered the estate to make three separate payments for Bloomsbury’s costs and Rowling’s costs by April 21, August 5 and November 11. The six sets of payments amount to £1,545,743. In case the estate fails to pay any of the scheduled payments on time, the court said the case would be immediately dismissed and the estate would have pay for the costs of Rowling and Bloomsbury.
The estate has claimed in its legal action that Rowling had copied parts from Jacob’s books in Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire. Rowling has termed the charge against her as “absurd” and “unfounded”.
Forty-five-year-old Rowling, a mother of three children, who lives in Edinburgh where she created her famous books about the boy wizard, said last year when the case was filed that she had never heard of the writer. “The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first accusation by those connected to the author’s estate in 2004,” she said.
Although Rowling and Bloomsbury had asked the court to throw out the claim made by the estate of Adrian Jacobs, who died in 1997, the court allowed the case despite acknowledging it had an improbable chance of success.