The BBC’s main article about the Da Vinci Code court ruling is headed: “Code unbroken; Author Dan Brown’s reputation stays intact after court victory” – damning with faint praise, surely?
The BBC’s main article about the Da Vinci Code court ruling is headed: “Code unbroken; Author Dan Brown’s reputation stays intact after court victory” – damning with faint praise, surely?
Yeah, it means the bones of Mary Magdalene will shortly be on ebay under the description “Get rich quick – for real this time”.
Quite how you can copyright a purported alternative history is something I have never understood. If I deny the holocaust, can David Irving sue me, I wonder.
Copyrighing alternative history is fine; it’s secret history that can’t be copyrighted.
Alternative history is avowed fiction – “what if XXX had happened”. Some examples of legitimate, copyrighted, alternative histories: Robert Sobel’s “For Want of a Nail” is the classic exemplar – and were I to write about the history of the United States of Mexico or of Kramer Associates, then I would most certainly be in breach of copyright.
Secret history purports to describe events that actually happened, but which were kept secret and do not appear in the conventional narrative.
Some secret history, such as Dan Brown, is avowed fiction; other secret history, such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is avowed non-fiction. I can see an avowed fictional storyline being copyrightable, but you can’t copyright events that you claim actually happened!