UK Appeals Court Says (Again) Da Vinci Code Is No Copy
from the moving-on dept
About a year ago, as hype over the novel The Da Vinci Code was at an all time high, the publisher of the book was sued by two authors of a supposedly non-fiction book who claimed Dan Brown infringed their copyright with his novel. That original book tried to expose some historical facts about "The Holy Grail" that were used as the setup for The Da Vinci Code. In fact, Dan Brown mentions the book in his novel -- so it's not much of a secret that he used it in his research. If you're writing a historical novel, you would think that it's expected that the author would read up on the histories and theories of the times they're writing about. So, it's difficult to see how there might be a claim here. You cannot copyright facts. The original case was quickly thrown out, but the authors still appealed. Derek Coward writes in to let us know that a London Appeals Court has now agreed that The Da Vinci Code is not infringing on anyone's copyright. As the court stated, copyright "does not extend to facts, theories, and themes." This should have been obvious to anyone from the beginning, but considering how poorly researched some say the original "non-fiction" work was -- perhaps its no surprise that the authors didn't bother to research how copyrights work before filing their lawsuit. The suit is so ridiculous that it seems half likely that it was simply filed as a publicity stunt to get more attention for the original book -- so we won't even bother to name it here. Either way, it's nice to know that using historical theories in a historical novel is still perfectly legal.
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Of course who'd be cynical enough to file a lawsuit for publicity .. ?
--Q
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Quarrel
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"facts"
Seeing as how it's incredibly hard to even prove Jesus existed as the person everyone claims he was, I don't see that as a fact. Russ Kick's book "Everything You Know is Wrong" is a very good place to start to learn about this. Suffice to say, using the book's criteria for proving someone existed, I can prove Abraham Lincoln existed, as well as Nero and many, many others but there is much difficulty in proving Jesus existed as "Jesus The Christ" outside of the bible.
A good question to ask oneself might be "why is the date of Easter based around the phases of the moon?"
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A good question to ask oneself might be "why is the date of Easter based around the phases of the moon?"
Because Christians believe that Jesus was crucified at the Passover, and Passover is defined in the ancient Jewish lunar calendar. I don't see how this proves or disproves anything.
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It has to be a copy
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However, we are overlooking a new attempt to aggrandize the scope of copyright to further chill innovation. The New York Times article wrote: "Baigent and Leigh ''expended a vast amount of skill and labor'' on their book, their lawyers said. ''That skill and labor is protectable.''". So what this apparently means is that if one spends time doing research and then someone else uses the facts of that research, you now owe them for the time and effort of them doing that research!!!!! No college student would ever be able to do research again.
I can only hope that these absurd attempts to aggrandize copyright/patents will be squelched by court sanity.
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Proof of Jesus
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Re: Proof of Jesus
One theory holds that the resurrection and ascension were added to the story of Jesus several years after his death. That the item of "power" the
Knights Templar had was proof that Jesus was not resurrected and that his physical body did not ascend to heaven.
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