Did the “DaVinci Code” Court Battle Grip You?
It didn’t me. I found it to be a subject of rather low interest. It seems that everyone ends up in court over some success, one way or the other. Author Dan Brown was accused of using parts of another book in his amazingly successful book, The DaVinci Code, but the London court ruled in Brown’s favor. This will, no doubt, have some impact on copyright law in the future. And I doubt it will hurt future sales of Dan Brown’s novels.
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I’ve been following the whole thing rather closely. I’m a little disappointed that Baigent and Leigh lost because they seemed to have a pretty good case. Honestly, the only good thing about the Da Vinci Code is that it incites you to question the way history has always been presented and start the ‘what ifs’.
I found it spectacularly bland in its writing style. The love story is forced, and the characters are not really fleshed out. The only good thing about it is the ideas it presents, and those have clearly mostly been ‘borrowed’ from Baigent and Leigh’s book. But apparenly, ideas don’t fall under copyright protection laws. And that’s the only reason Brown won.
That said, he may have won the lawsuit, but as far as I’m concerned he’s lost a lot in credibility. Not all of us have a short term memory, and some of what he said was the exact opposite of what he’d been saying when the book came out (I’m thinking about a part about Jesus not dying on the cross being initially included in the book). His poor writing as well as his refusal to honestly acknowledge his sources will definitely prevent me from buying any of his future books.