Comments on: Dan Brown Update: It’s All In The Execution

By: Booksquare

Booksquare — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 05:31:40 +0000

I doubt that this case can be lost — but, let’s be honest, I’ve been wrong once or twice (see: previous high profile legal cases). I am admittedly paranoid, but there is a strange anti-creative bias happening. I can’t imagine anyone determining that these authors, at this point in their book’s cycle, have suffered damage. That ideas are coming into the argument disturbs me.

Of course, staying away from new ideas is a problem. I always think I’m being original. Copyright is big business, and when art collides with business, rational thought is thrown out. No, I don’t think the plaintiffs will win; it’s the fact that this went to trial that gives me pause (not, of course, knowing the underlying UK laws).

By: David Thayer

David Thayer — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 18:31:40 +0000

Brown can’t lose the case. Random House UK is the defendant and the theory of the case seems to be about remedy rather than the underlying issue of plagiarism. In theory the two authors suffered harm in the marketplace and the remedy would be compensatory damages. If this were a US case the test would be to prove damage was done rather than demonstrate that ideas were stolen. I don’t think a court wants to arbitrate the creative process and, despite the rhetoric, I don’t think that’s what it has been asked to do.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:34:45 +0000

If Brown were to lose his case, it would be virtually impossible for anyone, authors in particular, to expound on new ideas for fear of being accused of “theft.”

Strangely enough, there is already precedence in the photographic world that protects one photographer’s visual “idea” from being replicated, in substance, by another. Essentially, a professional photographer had taken a photograph of a woman standing, against the backdrop of a sunset, with the falling sun between her outstretched legs. Another photographer, for a customer, took a similar shot. It was ruled to be a copyright infringement.

Altogether, a potentially chilling effect. Fortunately, there are so many ideas out in the world now, in published form, that existing ideas, unless truly unique, should be considered to be in the public domain. Just stay away from new ones.