What a relief. A high court judge in Britain has determined that Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code did not infringe the copyright of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. So now the legal cloud is lifted from the movie.
But do we know the real truth behind the Da Vinci Mystery? For instance, isn’t it odd that both books were published by Random House? Isn’t it strange that the mysterious expert in DVC, Sir Leigh
Teabing, is an anagram of Baigent and Leigh? Isn’t it a little too hard to accept Dan Brown’s claim that he only consulted HBHG in the later stages of writing DVC, considering that so many of the ideas developed in HBHG turned up in DVC?
According to the London Daily Telegraph
HBHG, published in 1982, deals with a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child and that the bloodline continues to this day, with a secret society protecting their heirs against wicked conspiracies enacted by the Church.
Sounds pretty much what DVC is all about. But the judge said that, even with the similarities, Dan Brown’s book did not “breach the copyright of Baigent and Leigh’s book.”
Do you think that Dan Brown, “the highest-paid writer in history,” sold the movie rights for a fixed sum, or do you think that he also figured on a percent of the gross? Wikipedia says the rights fee was $6,000,0000. But will we ever know the truth?
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