The Da Vinci Code

Baigent and another v Random House Group Ltd [2006] EWHC 719 (Ch); NLJ 14 April

The authors of a little known work of non-fiction, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, published in 1982, alleged that Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, breached the copyright of the book. They alleged that he had copied the ‘central theme’ of the book – the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene resulting in the merging of Jesus’s bloodline with that of the Merovingian dynasty. There was no allegation of literal copying of the text and therefore any copyright infringement could only be found if the structure and architecture of the claimant’s work had been copied. The judge found that the claimant’s book did not have any central theme and that even if a central theme did exist and had been copied, it was too general to be capable of protection by copyright law. It appeared to the judge that the claimants started by looking in The Da Vinci Code to find things in it and worked backward from that exercise to create a central theme in their own work, rather than identifying a central theme in their work and then seeing whether it was to be found in the defendant’s book. It was an artificial contrivance designed to create an illusion of a central theme. In the book the defendant had made a genuine and handsome recognition of the claimants’ role by referring to them and naming a central character after them.