Let Dan Brown Relax and Count His Money
This article in Slate Magazine explains, in excruciating detail, why the plagerism lawsuit against Random House should be worthless. The Da Vinci Code should have been able to take every single idea in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and still not be liable for it. Here’s why. HBHG was published as non-fiction.
Intellectual property law in this country says that you can’t copywrite an idea that you call a fact. If you publish a story that says Ronald Regan was bionic, then back it up with interviews from people who claim they saw him oiling his joints before stepping off Air Force One, that’s considered non-fiction. If you leave out the interviews, it’s fiction.
As a reader, you’re more likely to read the non-fiction version because you’re dying to see how they made a case for the six-million-dollar president. But once it’s out there as non-fiction, it becomes a source of research. You claim it’s the truth, and you can’t copywrite truth. You can only copywrite the way that you told it.
Random House’s defense is that Dan Brown read HBHG and plenty of other literature on the subject, so of course he used some of the same ideas. The case will come down to similarity in wording between the two works.
Personally, I thought Da Vinci Code was a lousy novel (it reads like a hack screenplay and that should be the job of the actual hack screenwriter, not the novelist) but a fascinating vehicle for research. When the movie comes out this summer, I may even buy a copy of HBHG myself. If Random House is smart they’ll cross-plug it; after all, they published both books.
April 8th, 2006 at 2:54 am
[...] As I advocated in my previous blog, a London court has decided that the breach of copywrite suit against Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE is without merit. “Utterly without merit,” Dan Brown says. Did he steal that phrase? No. It was fair use. [...]