Da Vinci Code Author Sued

riptalon writes "Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, is being sued in the UK for using ideas from a previous non fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in his novel. The Bangkok Post states that 'The question the court is facing is whether you can copyright an idea, a conjecture.'"

Comments

Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is just a marketing scam!
Look,

"The legal action has seen The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail shoot up the Amazon.co.uk bestseller chart from number 173 at lunchtime, to 102 by 2.30pm and was at 53 late this afternoon."

These guys are doing it to make a buck or two--I'd never heard of the book until now.

Also Lewis Perdue's "The Da Vinci Legacy"

[rmpotter]

Lewis Perdue also claims his 1983 novel "The Da Vinci Legacy" was largely plagiarized by Brown. You can read 'Da Vinci Code' Plagiarism Lawsuits for more details. If i look back far enough, surely I _must_ have written something I can sue them both for ;-)

Re:I would sue him too

[Zocalo]

"Teabing" is also an acronym of "Baigent", the surname of the co-author of HBHG. I think that makes it pretty clear that Dan Brown wasn't trying to pretend that he had come up with an original idea about Jesus and Mary Magdalene and was giving them a nod. Frankly, this smacks of someone trying to cash in on Dan Brown's success, but even so, it's going to be interesting trying to watch a judge try and place a line in the sand about how much of an idea can be borrowed without infringing on copyright should the case actually make it to trial. I actually think that is fairly likely because it would be idiotic to settle on this given that HBHG was supposed to be a factual theory, admittedly based on some very sketchy "evidence", and not outright fiction. Never mind that the extremely broad claims of the infringement would open up just about any publisher of a work of fiction published in the UK to be sued on the same grounds; truly original fiction is an *extremely* rare thing.

Re:Well...

[orac2]

Sort of like George Lucas thinking that he invented science fiction and suing everyone he spots making too much money.

You're refering to the (original) Battlestar Galactica law suit aren't you?

A brief point of clarification

[sirrobert]

Disclaimer: This is intended to be a point of clarification, not an argument (or the backing of an argument). Being a classicist generally trained in philosophy (according to my alma mater and diploma, anyway =), I should disclose that I'm not really generally interested in "church doctrine" as much as claims of original source texts. What follows is based on original source texts -- I have no idea what the accepted doctrinal teachings of various churches are on the matter.

Yeah, I'm just a stupid athiest and stuff, but doesn't this make Jesus' sacrifice, well, worthless? I mean, if he were truly 'God,' as is claimed, then his sacrifice was really nothing. 'Sacrifice' means giving something up; what did Jesus give up, if all He did was go up to heaven to stand bside His Father, casting judgement and hell upon all who do not believe in Him?

Re: 'Sacrifice' means giving something up; what did Jesus give up...? The claim is that what he gave up was unity with his father. That is, the father and the son are one in spirit, but the Son suffers disunity with his father (that's the idea behind that whole "Why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1) (Matthew 27) quotation that Jesus recites while being crucified). Since the father is the source of all life (and good, and such), the son is made to suffer the pain of death in the form of disunity with the source of his life.

Re: "...if all He did was go up to heaven to stand bside His Father..." The idea behind this is that if his death had been just, then it would have been the final word on the matter, but since his death was by his own choice as an act of mercy (a death by proxy for people who had sinned), it wasn't un-just to overturn the sentence (as it would be for someone who justly deserved death). Note that that doesn't un-do the sentence, it just ends it -- as if you pardoned someone who was on death row that you found out wasn't guilty of the crime... they still served the time, they just didn't have to serve it "forever."

Re: "...casting judgement and hell upon all who do not believe in Him..." Hell isn't actually related to the judgement (I know that's an odd sounding claim, but the bit that describes the whole hell thing is pretty unambiguous (Rev. 20:12-15):

(12)And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. (13)The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. (14)Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. (15)If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Notice that everyone is judged -- people who do believe in him and people who don't. Also notice (in 15) that the criterion for "the lake of fire" is whether one's name is written in "the book of life" which is a way of saying something like "Jesus's little black book." The one set of books is what you've done, the other book is whether you believed in him. So you can be a rat-bastardly Christian or a most excellent non-Christian and that's not relevant to the whole life/death bit. (Though the claim is you won't find a single person besides Jesus who hasn't ever given in to any temptation ... some people will ask about babies and retarded kids and such at this point. I don't know how that works, but I would generally respond that the picture that we tend to see (Old Testament and New Testament) is that God prefers mercy to just

Re:Hardly "unique".

[10Ghz]

I finally saw the "Last Temptation" about two years ago. And I thought that it was a really good and thought-provoking film. I'm agnostic myself, so maybe my opinion does not apply to believers. But then again, to me it seems that the complaints that the movie received were mainly due to the fact that people did not understand what they were seeing. It's like when people complained that "Life of Brian" makes fun of Jesus, when in fact Jesus only appears in one scene for about 10 seconds. And, ironically, his appearance on that scene is pretty accurate to the way it was described in the Bible.