In 1982, the book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (HBHG) advanced a centuries old story that Mary and Jesus were married and that their blood line both survives into the present and has a guardian cult. The book, HBHG, was headed into the usual destination: obscurity, when Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” was published in 2003. In the year before Brown’s book was published, 2002, the total number of copies of HBHB sold in the UK reached 357.

After The Da Vinci Code published, sales of HBHG went up over one thousand times (1,000+). Even with that spike in sales, HBHG did not generate the 77 million dollars in royalties that The Da Vinci Code generated for Brown (that’s just the book sales, not including the movie deal)

Both books are published by the same house, Harper Collins.

The HBHG authors sued Brown for copyright infringement. Brown not only included parts of the centuries old story in The Da Vinci Code, but also cited and gave credit to HBHG.

Last week, the HBHG plaintiffs got a double loss. First the court ruled against them stating that the architecture that Brown took was “not crucial or important text in the creation of “The Da Vinci Code” framework. Then, following the UK tradition of loser pays both parties legal fees, the HBHG plaintiffs will foot 85% of the legal bills of both Brown and Harper which are reported to exceed 2.5 million dollars.

The downside of this case for some of us is Dan Brown’s statement that he can now get back to writing more books.

This entry was posted by Kate Spelman on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.