The Noisy Librarian writes “Salon.com provides a scathing indictment of the popular novel, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown:
‘A cozy situation for Brown, but it became somewhat less so recently when, in the U.K., a lawsuit was filed against him for “breach of copyright of ideas and research.” The complainants, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, are the coauthors, with Henry Lincoln, of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” a bestseller from the early 1980s. Virtually all the bogus history in “The Da Vinci Code” — nearly everything, in other words, that today’s readers’ find so electrifying in Brown’s novel — is lifted from “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”‘
The site requires membership, but you can get a day pass by watching a short ad. Hey, at least you don’t have to surrender your address or birth year!”
Fiction
Brown can always assert that, as a work of fiction, “The Da Vinci Code” can’t be held to any standard of accuracy…
However, if the “research” and ideas in “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” are not the original creations of the book’s authors, they become harder to copyright, and the possible infringement suit against Brown might be weakened. No one, after all, has a copyright on the facts surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s assassination or the Treaty of Versailles.
Jealous because Brown wrote a better book? More likely, the Holy Blood authors are broke and Brown has cash to burn.
Re:Fiction
I certainly read the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail as fiction but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do a lot of research which showed up again in Brown’s book.