JK Rowling never denied having done her homework before grinding out the Harry Potter books (which I, being a prole, enjoyed reading enormously), so it's all fantasy based on myths based on folklore, and inevitably, there will be people suing her for infringement of copyright.
However, being entirely fair about all of this, a couple of days ago, we cracked open a nice box set of books which The Lass had received for her birthday, called The Worst Witch, first published in 1974, and, pardon my French, the stories are like a first draft (and I mean that in a good way, all the important elements are there) of the Harry Potter books and/or the Harry Potter books boiled down to the level which five- to ten-year old girls would find amusing but not threatening. Only they were first published twenty years before the Harry Potter books.
I accept that there is no copyright in 'ideas', as such, and I find these copyright lawsuits a decade or more after the event rather lame, but in this case, if Jill Murphy had a pop at JK Rowling, I would be rooting for her.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Plagiarism
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5 comments:
I read 'The Worst Witch' at school.
But then again you can't tell me 'Star Wars' wasn't a copy of 'Lord of the Rings'?
The little insignificant guy living in the back of beyond bumps into the old wizard and gets roped into saving the world/galaxy because he's the 'chosen one'? The Matrix?
It's a great story, and if you can think of a new way of marketing it, it will sell again and again and again.
S_L, no, I can't tell you that because I only read one Star Wars book thirty five years ago ('Splinters of the mind's eye', it was shit) and I read the first five or six pages of 'The Hobbit' and I thought that was shit as well. So I am no expert in these matters.
But apparently Star Wars invented the cliche "We need you Major, we need you to fly again", one of my favourite movie cliches of all time.
See also Firefox, The Rock, Cliffhanger, etc.
Published in 1990, 'The Adventures Of Endill Swift' by Stuart McDonald tells the story of a young boy sent away to the boarding school previously attended by his mysterious father.
The school,unknown to the outside world, is on an island in a lake. 'Endill could make out towers, turrets, spires and endless amounts of windows. It looked like hundreds and hundreds of houses all piled dangerously on top of each other and Endill wondered if it was safe to live in such a place'.
It also features a moving corridor and a library so big that readers need climbing skills. Endill must befriend the mysterious creature that lives on the upper shelves.
As a book by an Edinburgh-based author and illustrator, 'Endill Swift' was well known in the city when Rowling began writing there, despite making less impact south of the border.
Steven_L,
Star Wars didn't get much from LOTR. About the biggest influence was Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces". There's also quite a lot of influence of Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress", Flash Gordon and buddhism.
McH, good one.
JT, now I think about it, wasn't Star Wars based on the Wizard of Oz?
C3PO = tin man
R2D2 = Toto
Chewbacca and/or Han Solo = Lion
Luke = Dorothy
Obi Wan = the wizard
Darth Vader = White Witch
and so on
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