Da Vinci Code Goes To Court Over Idea Pinch Claims

We all know the hype that The Da Vinci Code is getting. There was the Da Vinci Code book, the forthcoming Da Vinci Code film, and now there’s the cherry on the top - the Da Vinci Code court case.

Two authors are claiming that Dan Brown ripped off their ideas for The Da Vinci Code, and they’re upset that it isn’t their book that every single idiot on the tube has got their noses stuck into, and that Tom Hanks isn’t going to be in a film about their book, and that they’re not so rich that they need never work again. Or something - anyway, it’s a breach of copyright case.

The Da Vinci Code (Books) - for those of you who don’t know - is an absurdly
popular book that claims that Jesus secretly painted The Mona Lisa in
his spare time, and that he also built a church on a citybreak holiday
in Scotland while he teased Tom Hanks and that girl from Amelie via
text message. Something like that, anyway. It’s not as if we’ve
actually read the thing.

And now Random House - the publisher behind The Da Vinci Code - is
being sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claim that The Da
Vinci Code steals the "architecture" of their 1982 non-fiction book The
Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Both books deal with the same theme -
OK, so we do know - that Jesus shacked up with a prostitute and had a
kid, creating a bloodline which is still around today that the Catholic
Church is all antsy about.

Although The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail was a bestseller, it was
nowhere near to being the phenomenon that The Da Vinci Code is - in one
year alone, it made Dan Brown £45 million. Brown acknowledges the
theories of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail in The Da Vinci Code, and
it’s also rumoured that the book’s villain - Sir Leigh Teabing - is a part
anagram of Baigent and Leigh. According to The Guardian, Baigent and
Leigh have little chance of winning the case, though. It quotes
copyright law solicitor David Hooper as saying:

"You can’t copyright
an idea. Unless you’ve got something like a patent or a trademark, you
haven’t got a monopoly. If somebody picks up your idea and says that’s
a great idea and works on it themselves, that’s not breach of
copyright. That’s
how creative things work. I think what Dan Brown is going to say is
that this is over 20 years later, he has done an immense amount of
research, and it’s in an entirely different format."

Whatever the
outcome of the court case, chances are that millions of people will
still read the Da Vinci Code book, watch the Da Vinci Code movie when
it is released and be thoroughly sick of anything to do with The Da
Vinci Code by the end of the year.

Read more:

Millions at stake in Da Vinci Code court case - Guardian 

[story by Stuart Heritage]