The suit claiming that Dan Brown committed a copyright violation when he wrote The Da Vinci Code has been dismissed.
This is a personal disappointment to me, because I can prove that I used the words “Da Vinci” and “code” prior to the novel’s publication, and I was hoping to bring my own suit against Brown, since he obviously plagiarized my vocabulary.
Rats.
From Booksquare, on The Da Vinci Code trial (which I blogged about previously here):
[W]e do appreciate the fact that the British taxpayers are covering the costs for the most intriguing marketing campaign of the season.
Sales of the plaintiffs’ book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are way up, of course.
I detect a categorical similarity to the post-Oprah James Frey bump. And I furthermore suggest all writers immediately consider ways they can grab headlines, post-publication, through a lurid public display of their baser natures.
UPATE: suit dismissed.
No, not the gazebo in the back yard.
There are two writers suing Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. Their names are Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and they have a book, too: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It was published in 1982. I have a hunch it hasn’t sold as many copies as TDVC.
Whether they feel their sorry sales numbers are an outrage is hard to say (ha ha ha) but oh, are they pissed that Brown used their “architecture.” As explained by the New York Times (registration required), Baigent, Leigh and a third author (who declined to participate in the suit)
spent five years, from 1976 to 1981, researching the book . . . before arriving at what they call the “central architecture” of their argument. It is this architecture — the trajectory of the case they make in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” — that they say Mr. Brown appropriated, rather than individual words or passages.
So. He hasn’t plagiarized — not in the way we usually think of plagiarizing. What he’s done is to re-use some elements of a story that they told in their book over two decades ago (adding, btw, a lot of his own invention in the retelling).
And he was either luckier, or cleverer, or a better story teller than they were, and consequently, his book was a blockbuster.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out . . .
UPDATE: I’ve posted more here.
