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High Court rejects copyright infringement claim in Da Vinci Code Case [ 10 Nov 2006]
Michelle Moriarty
There has been much in the press about the recent case for copyright infringement brought by the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail against the publishers of the bestselling The Da Vinci Code.
The authors of The Holy Blood and Holy Grail (published in 1982) alleged that Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code (published in 2003), infringed the copyright of their earlier work.
The central question that the court had to decide upon was whether there had been a non-textual infringement by Dan Brown of the claimant authors' book.
The claimant authors argued that Dan Brown’s work had copied the central theme of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail which postulated the theory that Jesus had married and had children with Mary Magdalene and that this bloodline had resurfaced in the Merovingian French dynasty, which was protected by the secret society of the Priory of Sion.
The defence, whilst acknowledging that Dan Brown had used The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail as a source for his novel, argued that he had done so in conjunction with a number of other sources to identify general ideas. It was also argued that the synopsis for The Da Vinci Code was written before Mr Brown’s wife (who carried out the research for the book) had read The Holy Blood and Holy Grail and that the central theme of the claimant authors’ work was not a central theme in The Da Vinci Code.
Whilst the court agreed with the claimants that some passages of the later work contained language which was similar to that contained in the earlier work, these incidents were too generalised and could not be relied upon for textual or non-textual copyright infringement, so the claimants lost the case.
This decision highlights the balance that needs to be struck between protecting the rights of authors of non-fictional historical works on the one hand and permitting novelists the freedom to write fictional works set in a historical context on the other.
Claims based on non-textual infringement, whilst relatively rare in the literary world, are commonly encountered in relation to software and TV format rights [(witness the recent case concerning the format for Who Wants to be a Millionaire)]. However claimants have tended to struggle to show that it is not just their ideas that have been copied but the expression of them.
As the judge in the Da Vinci case stated, copyright offers protection not to the themes and ideas in a work but the manner in which those facts, themes and ideas are put together as a result of an author's efforts.
