This is the latest controversial lawsuit, the copyright infringement lawsuit against Bloomsbury and J K Rowling:

1987 Adrian Jacobs wrote the book “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard-No 1 Livid Land”, which describes the adventures of a wizard named Willy. The copyright allegation argues that the plot of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, published in 2000 and one of J.K.Rowling’s best-selling books, is a copy of that to be found in Jacobs’ book. Both books describe the adventures of a main character, “Willy” in Jacobs’ book and “Harry Potter” in Rowling’s, who are wizards, who compete in a wizard contest which they ultimately win. Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures, “the merpeople” in Harry Potter. Many other similarities are described in the Claim filed by the Estate, which include the idea of wizards travelling on trains, famously referred to in Harry Potter as the Hogwarts Express. It is alleged that all of these are concepts first created by Adrian Jacobs in Willy the Wizard, some 10 years before JK Rowling first published any of the Harry Potter novels and 13 years before Goblet of Fire was published.

It is also alleged that, at the time in trying to get his work published, Mr Jacobs sought the services of a literary agent, Christopher Little, who also later became Ms Rowling’s literary agent in the Harry Potter series.

Quite a shocker.