BRITAIN: Author Dan Brown did not copy material from an earlier book when he wrote The Da Vinci Code, his best-selling religious thriller at the centre of a copyright case, a lawyer told London's high court yesterday.
With more than 36 million copies of his novel in circulation and a major Hollywood adaptation due for release in May, the stakes are high in a case brought against Brown's British publishers by historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.
In opening arguments for the defence, publisher Random House said that much of the "central theme" of The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, which the authors say has been plagiarised, did not in fact appear in The Da Vinci Code.
"A further difficulty for the claimant is that The Da Vinci Code doesn't actually have many of the points of the central theme," said the publisher's lawyer, John Baldwin. "We say that's fatal to their case." On the second day of the trial, with Brown again present in court, Mr Baldwin also argued that the ideas the historians were seeking to protect were too general.
"The claimants' claim relates to ideas at a high level of generality, which copyright does not protect," the publishers said in a document outlining their case.
They add that the complaint appears to centre on the idea in The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, they had children who survived and married into a line of French kings, that the lineage continues today, and that a secret society based in France aims to restore the lineage to the thrones of Europe.
"The claimants contend that their idea is protected by copyright, whereas Random contend there is no copyright in information of this nature, and that in any event there was no copying," the publisher said.
The case has generated considerable media interest, both because it involves one of the world's most successful authors and because it pits the rights of an author to use existing research against protection of non-fiction writers behind it.
Commentators point out that a character in Brown's book, Sir Leigh Teabing, has a name that is an anagram of Leigh and Baigent. A third author of the 1982 book, Henry Lincoln, has decided to stay out of the action.
The defence admits that Brown looked at The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, also published by Random House and a best-seller in its own right, when he was writing his novel. In fact, the character Teabing refers to it.
But lawyers argue that he had already written a synopsis of The Da Vinci Code before either he or his wife ever looked at the other work. Brown's wife does some of his research for him.
Last August, Brown won a court ruling against another writer, Lewis Perdue, who claimed The Da Vinci Code copied elements of two of his novels, Daughter of God and The Da Vinci Legacy.
The hearings have been adjourned until next Tuesday to allow the judge time to read the books and other related material.