Nothing breeds lawsuits like success. Apart from The Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare, nothing has captured the hearts and minds of a generation of readers like the Harry Potter saga. In our modern age, of course, the price of fame is being subject to calumny and accusations of plagiarism, copyright infringement, and [...]
Tags:Copyright·Harry Potter·J.K. Rowling·plagiarism·Willy the Wizard
Several years ago, Jonathan Lethem wrote a brilliant article defending the use of “borrowing” by writers in their pursuit of new creation, arguing that creation itself necessarily calls upon the inchoate melange of what one has read over one’s life as an unconscious source of style, language, allegory, sentence structure, plot, and pacing, and that — in a sense — imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Tags:Bleak House·copyright infringement·Hamlet·intellectual property·James Joyce·King Lear·New York Times·plagiarism·Romeo and Juliet·Shakespeare
I am a commercial litigator and intellectual property lawyer at Callahan & Blaine in Orange County. Although my practice encompasses a wide variety of business disputes, I have a particular fondness for, and am prone to wax philosophical on, the subjects of copyright and trademark infringement in music, literature, art, and film.
