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From pedlar of sacrilege about Christ's sex life to crafter of clunky dialogue and implausible plots, Dan Brown has been labelled many things plagiarist. Sitting in Court 61 of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Smith offered the world's highest paid author the solace of a sliver of academic integrity by throwing out a claim that he stole the plot for his international best-seller from a non-fiction book written 24 years ago. The authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG) were told that there was no evidence that Mr Brown had infringed their copyright, and thus dented their bank balances, by appropriating the central theme of their book for his unashamedly populist potboiler, which has sold 40 million copies worldwide. Instead, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the HBHG authors who brought the case, were last night facing a legal bill of about £2 million, after they were ordered to pay their own costs and 85 per cent of those of Mr Brown's publisher, Random House—put at £1.3 million. The case had turned on the allegation that Mr Brown, worth an £250 million, lifted the key theory of HBHG, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and left a traceable bloodline via the Merovingian dynasty of French kings. It was claimed that the reclusive Mr Brown was effectively lying when he insisted his attention had only been brought to HBHG by his wife and researcher, Blythe, in the closing stages of writing The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003. But after wading through both books and legal arguments filled with claims of betrayal and pseudo-historical conjecture to fill one of Mr Brown's own novels, the judge ruled that the authors of HBHG were themselves guilty, contriving their case by "selecting" a number of facts and ideas from the book for the purpose of the court case. The legal victory for Mr Brown, who emerged from his New England home to give evidence in the trial, removes the possibility that the release in May of the £10-million film version of The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks, would have to be cancelled or postponed. Although cleared of infringing copyright, Mr Brown did not escape all criticism. The judge found that he had copied some of the text from HBHG, and his claim not to have used his well-thumbed copy of the book early on in the process of writing The Da Vinci Code was untenable. — By arrangement with The Independent |
