A legal claim that JK Rowling lifted the plot of one of her Harry Potter books from the work of another writer is to go no further. The estate of late author Adrian Jacobs had claimed “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” plagiarised parts of his book, “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard”. The Court of Appeal had ordered the estate to pay the first stage of £1.5m as security for costs by last Friday. Because no payment was made to the court, the claim has now failed. It marks the end of a seven-year attempt by Paul Allen, the trustee of the estate of Adrian Jacobs, to win the case against Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury. “The whole thing is a scandal,” said David Hooper, a solicitor for Bloomsbury. “It was an absolutely ludicrous case.” Rowling had described the claim as “not only unfounded but absurd”, saying she had not seen the book until the claim was launched in 2004. Children’s author Jacobs died in 1997.
