Those pesky plagiarism charges facing J.K. Rowling just won’t go away. In 2004, the Harry Potter author was accused of lifting from a little-known 1987 book, The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, by U.K. author Adrian Jacobs. While the charges appear to be without merit, the case is now more likely to go to court after a British judge refused to dismiss the suit against Rowling. From The New York Times‘ Arts Beat blog:

Mr. Jacobs’s estate has said that Ms. Rowling’s fourth book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, published in 2000, took plot lines from the Willy the Wizard book. Ms. Rowling has vehemently denied the accusation, saying that she had not heard of Mr. Jacobs, who died in 1997, until the copyright claim was made in 2004 and had not read his book. A judge overseeing the case in Britain agreed that the assertions by Mr. Jacobs’s estate are improbable but refused to dismiss the suit. Ms. Rowling’s American publisher, Scholastic, said it considers the assertions to be completely without merit.