London – Britain’s Court of Appeal rejected a lawsuit Wednesday from two authors who claimed novelist Dan Brown stole their ideas for his blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code.”
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh had sued Brown’s publisher, Random House Inc., claiming he had copied from their 1982 nonfiction book, “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.” Both books deal with the theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child, and that the bloodline continues.
One of the judges said copyright protects an author’s labor in researching and writing a book but doesn’t extend to facts, theories and themes. One of Brown’s characters even praises Baigent and Leigh’s work, Lord Justice Bernard Rix noted.
“That is not the mark of an author who thought that he was making illegitimate use of the fruits of someone else’s literary labors, but of one who intended to acknowledge a debt of ideas, which he has gone on to express in his own way and for his own purposes,” Rix wrote.
