“This case is really interesting because it really is where copyright runs into First Amendment rights, and it shows the jagged line between them,” said Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, who also was part of the legal team that defended the publisher in “The Wind Done Gone” lawsuit.

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In examining questions of fair use of copyrighted work, courts have looked at whether a new work transforms the original in a significant way, Ms. Jenkins said, citing a Supreme Court ruling that a legitimate work must add “something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message.”

Mr. Colting, who is also the writer and publisher of lowbrow humor books for Nicotext, a Swedish company he started with a friend six years ago, said in a telephone interview that he never imagined that his book, which he described as his first attempt at serious fiction, might end up in court.

“In Sweden we don’t sue people,” he said.

Marcia Paul, a lawyer for Mr. Salinger, declined to comment on the case, citing her client’s desire for privacy. Court documents filed in the case describe Mr. Salinger, now 90, who lives in Cornish, N.H., as totally deaf, with “several age-related health problems,” including a recently broken hip that has put him in a rehabilitation facility. Mr. Salinger has not been photographed or granted an interview for decades.

Mr. Salinger will not attend the hearing, Ms. Paul said. Though he has not published any new work since 1965, he has sued several times to protect certain works, including successful efforts to stop publication of some of his personal letters in a biography and to halt a staging of “The Catcher in the Rye” by a college theater company in San Francisco. He has also turned down requests, from Steven Spielberg, among others, for movie adaptations of “The Catcher in the Rye.”

“He feels strongly that he wants his fiction and his characters to remain intact as he wrote them,” according to an affidavit by his literary agent.