Some cases turn on questions of a defendant's creative or commercial intent, or the likelihood that one work might steal sales from another. The first point raised in Stouffer's lawsuit is the purported resemblance between Larry and Harry. To prove copyright infringement, Stouffer's lawyers need to show that Rowling, who lives in Scotland, had a chance to read Stouffer's books, which were self-published in the United States in the 1980s, received limited distribution and quickly went out of print. Stouffer bases her assertion on a comparison between some pictures of Harry Potter and her own drawing of Larry. Larry Potter lacks Harry Potter's most distinctive features tape on his glasses, a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead and a knack for magic.
Deliberate appropriation can raise deeper issues.
In May, for example, Houghton Mifflin is planning to publish a novel called The Wind Done Gone , by Alice Randall, that revisits the plantation setting of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a slave. The trust's lawyers argue that an unauthorized spinoff threatens its future fees. Some intellectual property scholars say that The Wind Done Gone has the makings of a legal landmark because it raises, in unusually stark terms, the inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of expression. The legal limits of literary borrowing become even more complicated when stories and characters leap off the printed page and onto the silver screen or the toy store shelf. She registered her trademark for the first time last year.