London’s High Court has ruled that The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not infringe the copyright of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.
The claim was clearly without merit as copyright law only protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. Also if the idea itself is one which the authors claim is historical fact that would surely undermine their case further, but whether or not that is truly the case is pretty irrelevant.
Worryingly Jon Silverman a BBC legal affairs analyst does not think that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom.
But to suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far.
The judge himself acknowledged that nothing in the plaintiffs’ case would have stultified creative endeavour or extended the boundaries of copyright protection.
I wasn’t at the court so I don’t precisely know what the plaintiffs’ case actually hung on. Was it just idea theft as was portrayed in the media or was there claims that passages of their book appeared in virtually the same form in The Da Vinci Code?
I think that if the judgement had come down on the side of the plaintiffs and extended copyright law to cover ideas as well as the expression of those ideas then creativity would have been stifled. Corporations would start a landgrab of ideas and we’d find ourselves in a situation where every single new literary work would have to license the basic ideas from the corporate owners of those ideas.
But this is a nightmare situation that I believe is unlikely to come to pass as even corporations that otherwise lobby for extension to copyright protection could see that this would be an extension too far, it would be damaging to their own interests.
