In unequivocal language, Judge Allen Schwartz of the U.S. Court for the Southern District of New York last week rejected claims by author Nancy Stouffer that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books infringe on the trademarks of Stouffer's Muggles characters.
The court found "clear and convincing evidence" that there was no infringement and that Stouffer had made false claims in presenting material to the court for characters that she neither created nor sold when she claimed she did. Stouffer, the judge wrote, "engaged in a pattern of intentional bad faith conduct and failed to correct her fraudulent submissions," and ordered her to pay $50,000 in attorney's fees and court costs.
Stouffer filed suit in March 2000, charging Scholastic, Rowling, Time Warner, Mattel and Hasbro with eight counts of trademark infringement. In November 1999, Scholastic, along with TW's Warner Bros. division, filed a lawsuit asking the court to issue a judicial declaration that the Potter books do not infringe Stouffer's trademarks. The two suits subsequently were combined, and last week the court dismissed the case by granting summary judgment to Scholastic and Warner Bros.
In its decision, the court ruled that "the publication, distribution and exploitation of the Harry Potter books does not violate any of Stouffer's intellectual property rights." The ruling also permanently prohibits Stouffer from making false representations that she owns all rights to the Muggle trademark or that the Scholastic titles violate her trademark.
Stouffer's case rested on her ability to establish that she created the Muggles and Larry Potter characters in the 1980s, that Scholastic then made use of similar ideas, and that those ideas could confuse readers. But the court found against Stouffer on nearly all of these claims.
Overall, the judge seemed to accept the claims of Scholastic et al. that Stouffer revised and interpolated material at various points in the 1990s, possibly after the Scholastic books came out, in preparation for a lawsuit. He ruled that references to Larry Potter were few and far between and, in any event, could not have been created before 1991, because of the printing technology used.
He also said that Book Cook, a company Stouffer founded, could not be shown to have printed any material for a book with the word "Muggles" in its title. What's more, wrote the judge, the use of Muggles in Stouffer's work is unlikely to cause any confusion among readers.
The court also found fraudulent an invoice to the distributor Great Northern that Stouffer had alleged proved that she sold Larry Potter booklets to that company in 1988. The judge said the document contains a signature purporting to be from the president of that company that Stouffer herself may have forged. Finally, the judge said, there was no evidence that Rowling or illustrator Mary GrandPré even had access to Stouffer's work.
The decisive ruling caused Rowling's agent, Christopher Little, to say his client was "thrilled to have been vindicated so clearly," and he accused Stouffer of looking to exploit the success of Potter by issuing "totally bogus and malicious accusations."
Stouffer attorney Tom McNamara said he and Stouffer are "digesting the decision," and trying to evaluate the best way to proceed. Stouffer could file an appeal with the appelate court or ask for a reconsideration of the decision by Schwartz.
Stouffer's Muggles books, originally published in 1984, were republished in 2001 by Thurman House. Sales of the books were disappointing and Thurman House was closed when parent company Ottenheimer Publishers went out of business this summer.
