Good news! A British High Court Judge has decided for Dan Brown in the copyright lawsuit brought against him by two historians who alleged that he "stole" the ideas from their book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail.
I haven't understood why the case was even accepted by the Court. It is my understanding that the words and treatment used to convey a set of ideas can be copyrighted, but that the ideas themselves cannot. Or to say it another way, ideas are themselves public property. An author has ownership rights only in the specific words and treatment he created to present a set of ideas.
Had the historians won, that would seem to me to be a broad expansion of the copyright law, and have made research into ideas someone else published extremely difficult to publish.
Fortunately the Judge who made the decision appears to have read the law and understood what it meant. Since the historians will have to pay the legal expenses Dan Brown's publisher incurred, they are out about $1.4 million with this decision.
I approve.
[From The Guardian.]
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