Pasternak ordered to pay 99% of costs in copyright case

Anna Pasternak, the great niece of Dr Zhivago author Boris Pasternak, has been ordered to pay 99% of the costs in regards to the copyright infringement claim she brought against US author Lara Prescott. 

The decision was made in a costs hearing before Mr Justice Edwin Johnson on Friday 2nd December. 

Pasternak brought a claim in the High Court this summer, alleging seven chapters in Prescott’s book The Secrets We Kept (Hutchinson) infringed copyright in her own book Lara (William Collins). She claimed a substantial part of the selection, structure and arrangement of facts and incidents in her book had been copied by Prescott.    

On 25th October, Johnson dismissed the claims, save for one point concerning the proper acknowledgement of a few lines of a translation of a Russian judge’s publicly available judgment. 

He said it was “not surprising” that the sequence of events in each work “follows the same basic chronology” nor that “one finds some of the same details in each work”, noting “none of these areas of similarity or overlap seem to me to come anywhere near establishing that the defendant copied the selection of events in the relevant chapters of Lara, or any part of that selection.” 

He cited case law stating: “The need to prove copying involves showing a design nexus between the defendant’s and the claimant’s works. However, it is a mistake to believe that any nexus will do. The law of copyright has never gone as far as to protect general themes, styles or ideas.”  

Pasternak’s book is a factual account of the real-life inspiration for the character of Lara in Dr Zhivago, who she argued was Olga Ivinskaya, the author’s secret mistress and literary muse. Prescott’s novel uses the Cold War response to the publication of Dr Zhivago as part of its narrative, describing how the CIA smuggled copies of Dr Zhivago into the Society Union after the communist regime banned it. 

Speaking about today’s costs hearing, Prescott said: “I’m greatly relieved that the High Court has ruled that Anna Pasternak must pay 99% of our legal costs. It’s a shame so much time and money has been spent on a claim that never should have been brought in the first place, by a person who never even read my book. I’ve moved on, and I hope that Anna too can move on and find some personal peace. I hope this ruling means that in the future, baseless claims can be avoided; they only hurt writers during a time where the world needs books more than ever.”

Pasternak could not be reached for comment.