Nora Roberts is suing Cristiane Serruya for copyright infringement after allegations that the Brazilian author has plagiarized Roberts’ work on multiple occasions.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Serruya has been accused of plagiarizing multiple authors recently by Courtney Milan after a fan noticed similarities between the two authors. Milan, who has also worked in the legal profession, immediately investigated. As a result of this, it was discovered that there appeared to be instances of plagiarism by Serruya from many other authors. Serruya, at the time, claimed the copyright offenses occurred as a result of a ghostwriter she had hired.
Now, according to the Associated Press, Nora Roberts has moved forward with a lawsuit against Serruya. The papers were filed Wednesday morning in Rio de Janeiro, where Serruya lives. If Roberts is successful in her lawsuit, under Brazilian law, she could be entitled to up to “3,000 times the value of the highest sale price for any Serruya work mentioned in the lawsuit.”
Roberts has claimed that Serruya’s work is a “literary patchwork, piecing together phrases whose form portrays emotions practically identical to those expressed in the plaintiff’s books.”
“If you plagiarize, I will come for you,” Roberts told The Associated Press.
“If you take my work, you will pay for it and I will do my best to see you don’t write again.”
News of the alleged plagiarism came to a head in February when Milan posted about it on her blog. As the situation unfolded, the hashtag #CopyPasteCris was used to keep track of the alleged copyright infringements. At the time, Serruya closed her Twitter account and took her books down from Amazon.
Two months after the first accusation of plagiarism against the Brazilian romance novelist Cristiane Serruya, dozens more have found overlap with their work. Now, one of them, Nora Roberts, is suing. https://t.co/DgLMeX9ckb
— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) April 25, 2019
Serruya has also spoken to The Associated Press and claims she is a big fan of Roberts but denied she copied any of the author’s work intentionally.
“My books are big,” Serruya said.
“In a book of 120,000 words, it’s difficult to know how many supposedly came from a work of Nora Roberts.”
Roberts has also criticized Amazon for not finding the alleged plagiarism before fans noticed.
“Amazon didn’t find any of this. And that strikes me as a problem.”
When questioned, Amazon insisted that they take “violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously” and issued the following statement.
“We use a combination of teams of investigators and automated technology to prevent and catch the vast majority of bad actors who attempt to violate our policies before they publish. In the rare instance where one gets through, we investigate and remove violating books. Additionally, all Kindle product pages contain a link for anyone to flag suspicious titles and the team investigates all titles that are flagged.”
It is believed that this court case could take years to be sorted out in the Brazilian legal system.