More Good News For Dan Brown

Posted on April 24, 2006

More good news for Dan Brown: the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York has affirmed a lower court's ruling that Brown did not copy elements of another writer's work in his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code.

It was second legal victory for Brown this month, after a London court rejected the charges that he plagiarized another book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. In the New York case, author Lewis Perdue had claimed Brown's book infringed the copyright of his novels Daughter of God, which was published in 2000, and The Da Vinci Legacy, which came out in 1983.

Last August, Judge George Daniels of U.S. District Court in New York concluded: "A reasonable average lay observer would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter of God." "Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalized or otherwise unprotectable ideas," he said, adding that copyright did not protect an idea, but only the expression of an idea.

Brown's publisher, Doubleday, said in a statement that the federal appeals court in New York had confirmed that ruling this week, the news service reported. "This rapid and unanimous verdict confirms, once again, that this claim never had any merit," Brown said in the statement.

The film version of The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hands and Audrey Tatou opens nationwide on May 19th and Brown has said he is back at his desk working on The Solomon Key, which will be released in 2007. And all is right with the world.

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