The Da Vinci Code

This article relates to a copyright suit between Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors Baigent and Leigh and Dan Brown author of The Da Vinci Code.

An AP Wire article[1] published by the Charlotte Observer, reads (with added emphasis):

Jonathan Rayner James, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Monday that his clients were not attempting to claim a monopoly on ideas or historical debate, but to prove Brown had "relied heavily" on the earlier work, published in Britain in 1982 and the following year in the United States.

This neatly underlines an important issue, if not for Dan Brown, but for many other authors who fear that the notion of common ideas being shared between books of the same genre might be under threat. If a ruling of that kind emerges then the creative freedom of authors could be adversely affected. The result could be that less fiction is written.