Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, did not reproduce ideas from an earlier work in his best-selling novel, the Court of Appeal has ruled in Baigent v Random House Group.
The appeal court knocked back claims by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh that themes from their book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG), were plagiarised by Brown. The pair now face a legal bill of £3m.
A line had to be drawn between the legitimate use of ideas expressed and the unlawful copying of their expression, the court said. In this case, The Da Vinci Code fell the right side of the line and thus there had not been unlawful copying of the expression of the claimants’ ideas as set out in HBHG.
Carl Steele, a solicitor at Ashfords, says the case highlights the difficulty of succeeding with a claim for non-textual copyright infringement.
“The Court of Appeal has reaffirmed the well established principle that copyright does not subsist in ideas per se; it only protects the way in which those ideas are expressed. In each case,
