Well, That Took Long Enough
Posted By Ardellis on April 15, 2006
A week ago, Dan Brown won the lawsuit brought against him in UK court by two of the three authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and fiction writers everywhere in the world hove a collective sigh of relief. We don’t have to worry about using facts (or supposed facts) as concepts in our fiction, if someone has already published a nonfiction book about it.
Does the legal system in the UK work differently enough from the one in the US that the judge can’t throw out a case that is obviously without the least bit of merit? Because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why this thing went on as long as it did. A suit like this, in the US, would have been laughed out of town. An author holds the copyright on his or her words, but no one can copyright a fact (which some family historians don’t seem to be able to wrap their brains around, but that’s another story). And the fact is that there were people debating the Holy Grail equals Jesus’ descendants idea for ages before Baigent and Leigh ever drew breath. They weren’t claiming that Brown stole their words, just their facts. As far as I can see, they never had a case.
But in the UK, somehow, they did. For awhile at least. And now, instead, they have a bill for 85% of Random House’s legal costs — about £1.3m. I bet Henry Lincoln, the third author of HBHG, who declined to involve himself in this nonsense, knew this would happen. I hope he’s telling Baigent and Leigh “I told you so.”
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