Harry Potter copyright trial will go ahead despite judge's doubts about claim's chances

Adrian Jacobs wrote Willy The Wizard in 1987 and showed it to literary agent Christopher Little. He died in 1997 but his estate has sued Rowling over alleged copyright infringement because of similarities between Willy the Wizard and the fourth installment of Rowling's series, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, published in 2000.

Rowling and her publisher, Bloomsbury, argued that the claim had so little merit that it should not go to a full trial, but Mr Justice Kitchin has said that there is enough in dispute in the case to merit a trial.

Little claimed that he only read Willy The Wizard once and considered it to be terrible. Paul Allen, the trustee of Jacobs' estate, argued that Little actually represented Jacobs and at one point had 1,000 copies of the book delivered to his office. The judge said that these matters of fact were not something he could rule on in a summary judgement.

Copyright protects expressions of ideas but not the ideas themselves, and Jacobs' estate claims that overall plots and themes were copied, rather than specific text.

"Copyright does protect the content of a literary work, including the selection, arrangement and development of ideas, facts, incidents and the like," said Mr Justice Kitchin.

"The similarities on which Mr Allen relies seem to me to constitute ideas which are relatively simple and abstract and I strongly incline to the view that they are at such a high level of generality that they fall on the ideas rather than the expression side of the line," he said. "However I do not feel able at this stage to say that Mr Allen's case is so bad that I can properly describe it as fanciful."

"While I have expressed reservation about the repetition [Jacobs's allegedly copied elements] involve, I accept that [Allen] has a real prospect of establishing that collectively they represent the core of [the book's] architecture," he said.

The judge ordered a trial to go ahead.