Holy Blood, Holy Architecture
It seems that every time you open the paper at the moment there’s another story about the Dan Brown court case, asking whether he infringed copyright by ripping off the plot for The Da Vinci Code from the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And every time I see it, all I can think is, “Of course he didn’t. What kind of bizarro legal world is this?”
Not that I don’t agree that The Da Vinci Code has plenty in common with Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Yes, I’ve finally read the Code, on the flight back from Oz last year (thumbnail review: perfunctory writing, and Langdon’s a blob, but there are enough thrillerish twists and turns to make it understandable why it’s been a hit), and even I was reminded of Holy Blood, without even having read the latter—all I know about that comes from the general buzz when it was a bestseller. (It was a TV documentary first, so perhaps I saw that.)
But even if Dan Brown ripped off their ideas, in copyright terms it doesn’t matter, because copyright is about the specific expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. It’s the first thing you learn whenever you learn the first thing about copyright. I was so baffled that this case had actually made it to the courts that I checked to see what the experts at IPKat had to say—and they’re baffled, too:
Perhaps the IPKat is missing something here, but surely it’s trite law that an idea can’t be protected by copyright, particularly where it’s one based on supposed fact.
What on earth is going on? If this ends up establishing a precedent that copyright includes not just the expression of ideas but the ideas themselves, we’re all in trouble. We’re talking the collapse of every artform there is, and IP lawyers driving gold-plated Hummers around the streets of Bloomsbury.
The fact is, I would be perfectly within my rights to take the basic “Jesus boffed Mary Magdalene” plot point and write a 100,000-word thriller around it; I could even throw in a bit of hot gallery action to boot. Not that I’d have much luck getting it published, what with the Danish illustrations.
The Holy Blood authors’ case seems to hinge on the argument that Brown “lifted the whole architecture” of their work. From an academic standpoint, I can see how that would be upsetting; plagiarism is morally odious. But it has nothing to do with copyright, unless the plagiarism involves the copying of whole chunks of text, which isn’t being claimed here. Copying plots isn’t illegal.
Still, from the standpoint of someone who has sold 0 million copies of his imaginary bestseller, I can see how three people who had sold 2 million copies of their 20-year-old bestseller would feel burned by someone going on to sell nearly 40 million copies of his bestseller. After all, they’ve sold 2 million copies more than me, and I’m ropable.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write an imaginary bestseller that lifts the whole architecture of one of the seven basic stories.