Author of THE ART OF FIELDING is Being Sued for Copyright Infringement

If this story tells me anything, it says "Write The Dang Book Now, Not Later". A popular subject like baseball can muster a pool of writers who share common thoughts, skills, and experiences on the subject. It's inevitable someone would write a story that was similar to someone else's.
If you wait long enough then that random collection of monkeys will pound out copies of Shakespeare!

In one of my early efforts at writing, I posted a fanfic in a particular fandom.

About a year later, I was watching a TV scifi episode and realized that it was following my plot exactly - to the point that I had, by about 15 minutes in, been able to predict exactly what would happen and who the villain would turn out to be.

Did I think someone from network TV had stumbled upon my pathetic little fanfic and said "Yeah, I'm gonna steal that!"? No! I just assumed that both I and the writer had fished in the giant pool of tropes, and by chance reeled in enough similar ones to come up with similar plots.

One day I swear someone will sue a major writer on the grounds that "they start with a character, and that character is faced with a problem, and they have to struggle to solve it. And that's just what happens in *my* story!"

This seems to come up every so often (didn't someone sue J.K. Rowling for "stealing" the plot of his novel?) Not sure if the book was self-pubbed or not, but the basis seemed to be the use of the word "muggle" to describe non-magical people.

hester said:

This seems to come up every so often (didn't someone sue J.K. Rowling for "stealing" the plot of his novel?) Not sure if the book was self-pubbed or not, but the basis seemed to be the use of the word "muggle" to describe non-magical people.

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That's one of the lawsuits mentioned in this article. Most of them go nowhere, of course.

hester said:

This seems to come up every so often (didn't someone sue J.K. Rowling for "stealing" the plot of his novel?) Not sure if the book was self-pubbed or not, but the basis seemed to be the use of the word "muggle" to describe non-magical people.

Click to expand...

The lawsuit against Rowling (by Nancy Stouffer) could be a hysterical novel in its own right. Stouffer claimed her mostly self-published books had been selling in the *millions* per month, even though no one had heard of her before the suit. When asked for proof, she claimed a flood at home had destroyed her computer and all evidence of these massive sales.

By the time it was proven that some of her "evidence" was clearly manufactured after the start of the suit, and fined $50,000 for attempted deception of the court, it had reached high comedy levels. However, before the case I recall several articles that concluded that where there was smoke there must be fire, and that the author who created names like Remus Lupin and Dolores Umbridge would have stolen Harry Potter from "Larry Potter," an ostensible creation of Stouffer's.