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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Copyright protects the expression of an idea in a tangible medium. All of these story features are arguably expressions of the same idea, but they're not the same expression, so it's not a copyright issue.

There's an amazing variety of creative products that are based on the same idea; often the better ones aren't the first ones.

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Copyright protects more than just the specific expression, they also protect collections of ideas. If I publish a novel about a magical wizard who can control things with his mind, flies around the galaxy in a spaceship shaped like an X, carries a laser sword, and battles his cyborg father who wears all black, I bet I would get a call from Disney's lawyers. That is because my work could be deemed substantially similar to Disney's IP even if it is a different expression.

> I bet I would get a call from Disney's lawyers.

Disney's lawyers are famously litigious. I'm not clear that they would win a case here. (Although they might have success with this HN comment as evidence)

The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land (1987) has a similar high-level of comparison to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), and that case was thrown out.

Except that book didn't have "a similar high-level of comparison to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". To quote the judge: "The contrast between the total concept and feel of the works is so stark that any serious comparison of the two strains credulity"[1]. There is a sort of "know it when I see it" nature that is hard to define, but copyright certainly protects works that are substantially similar even if not straight copies, at least in the US.

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-12134288

What I mean is:

"Both Willy [a wizard] and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures."

is very comparable to your completely hypothetical example above.

So, if a paragraph of cherry-picked, high-level description are the only identified similarities, there is no case in copyright law.

The only real similarity between those two stories that isn't easily attributed to a trope of the genre is the fact that scene took place in a bathroom. Everything else is unspecific and common. Also there is a difference when one scene shows similarity rather than the overall arc of the story.

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