Prague - Never mess with the little wizard. That is a lesson learnt by Vlastimil Svoboda, director of Otto's publishing house, punished this week for forging one volume of the popular Harry Potter book series.
Svoboda was given one-year suspended jail sentence and he will have to pay a fine of 200 thousand Czech Crowns (nearly 10 thousand USD) for the misdeed. Furthermore, he is not allowed to work in publishing business for the next two years.
In 2001, the above mentioned publishing house produced and sold a little less than 10 thousand forged copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by British author Joanne Rowling.
Competitor claims financial loss
The court now found Svoboda in violation of copyright, which caused harm not only to the author of the book, but also to the publishing house Albatros, which is the sole holder of rights to publish the popular series about the wizard apprentice in the Czech Republic.
Svoboda's lawyer appealed against the court verdict right away.
Six years ago, publishing house Albatros printed the fourth volume of Harry Potter series in a limited edition. Shortly after that forgeries from Otto's publishing house appeared.
Albatros believes it suffered loss of about one hundred thousand Czech Crowns because of that and demanded a compensation of 1,4 million CZK.
However, this was not included in this week's sentence and Albatros will have to apply for civil case proceedings.
A Christmas dose of Russian symbolism?
Investigators were able to get hold of some invoices from Otto's publishing house distributors with the title "Goblet of Fire" included.
The company tried to object, coming up with explanation that it was not a book of Harry Potter stories, but a novel by Valery Bryusov, a leading member of the Russian Symbolist movement from the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
Judge Jana Pěchotová found this version unconvincing. "I can hardly imagine that Otto's publishing house would introduce such a hardly marketable title of a Russian author to the bookstores right before Christmas."
Editions of more than 10 thousand copies, like the one in question, are considered above the average for Czech book market standards.
Accidental discovery
The forgeries were found in 2004 by a sheer accident, when people from Albatros came to a storehouse of a bookseller in the city of Třebíč, some 160 kilometres south-east of Prague, to check whether books were stored in proper conditions as expected from each of their distributor.
The owner of the store admitted she had the copies of the Goblet of Fire from Svoboda. Soon after that another batch of forgeries was found in Prague suburb Horní Počernice.
The forged copies were exact imitations of the original edition, complete with the logo of Albatros, and they were sold for one hundred Czech Crowns, a third of the price of the original.
