How the Da Vinci Code Trial Ruling Will Affect Writers

Posted on March 27, 2006

Lisa Rogak of The Houston Chronicle explores the implications for writers if the court rules against Random House in the Dan Brown/Da Vinci Code plagiarism trial.

If the judge rules that Brown did indeed plagiarize from Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that they've profited from handsomely, needless to say research as we know it, for writers, students, professionals, anyone who relies on any form of media, will be forever changed.
The worst-case scenario is that a flurry of unfounded accusations will emanate from slighted creative types everywhere, with the "authors" of overheard conversations suing writers for "copying" their words and ideas. This prospect is much more frightening than James Frey's sin of thinking his fiction was no different from nonfiction. In the aftermath, the only thing that's changed in the publishing industry is that the fact-checking calvary is now called in whenever a manuscript is tagged as a "memoir."
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The fact of the matter is that Baigent and Leigh didn't pluck the premise for Holy Blood, Holy Grail out of thin air, since it's been written about and bandied about for centuries. They read about it somewhere else first. Just like Dan Brown. No one - artist or not - lives in a vacuum. We learn from and are inspired by the ideas of others, which we then absorb and convert into our own. Then someday, someone else will hopefully be likewise inspired by our ideas.
Perhaps Chilean novelist Isabel Allende said it best in her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses: "Copying one author is plagiarism. Copying many is research."

We hope that the judge does the right thing and rules against the plaintiffs. Otherwise, writers are going to have a very hard time using any research at all in their novels. And although the case is in England, a) any American writer who sells his books in England would be affected and b) our system of jurisprudence is founded on the English one. It's not beyond the pale that our courts would at least consider the decision, although it is well-settled under American copyright law that ideas are not copyrightable.