Inaccuracies in The Da Vinci Code - Allegations of Plagiarism

Allegations of Plagiarism

Two lawsuits have been brought alleging plagiarism in The Da Vinci Code.

On April 11, 2005, novelist Lewis Perdue sued Brown and his publisher Random House for plagiarizing his novels The Da Vinci Legacy (1983) and Daughter of God (2000), claiming "there are far too many parallels between my books and The Da Vinci Code for it to be an accident." On August 4, 2005, District Judge George B. Daniels granted a motion for summary judgment and dismissed the suit, ruling that "a reasonable average lay observer would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter of God. Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalized or otherwise unprotectable ideas." He affirmed that The Da Vinci Code does not infringe upon copyrights held by Perdue.

In February 2006, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, took the UK publisher of The Da Vinci Code to court for breach of copyright, alleging plagiarism. Some sources suggested the lawsuit was a publicity stunt intended to boost sales of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (a boost which did in fact occur). However, the projected court costs of over 1 million pounds outweigh or at least substantially reduce the financial benefit of the lawsuit.

Dan Brown repeatedly said in his defense that history cannot be plagiarized and therefore the accusations of the two authors were false. Leigh stated, "It's not that Dan Brown has lifted certain ideas because a number of people have done that before. It's rather that he's lifted the whole architecture – the whole jigsaw puzzle – and hung it on to the peg of a fictional thriller". Dan Brown has admitted some of the ideas taken from Baigent and Leigh's work were indispensable to the book but stated that there were many other sources also behind it. However, he claimed that neither he nor his wife had read Baigent and Leigh's book when he produced his original "synopsis" of the novel. Among Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's arguments were that the given name of the character Sir Leigh Teabing's is the same of Richard Leigh's surname, and that "Teabing" is an anagram of "Baigent".

On April 7, 2006, High Court judge Sir Peter Smith rejected the copyright-infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and Random House won the court case. However, in the published extracts of his judgement the judge criticised the non-appearance of Blythe Brown and the vagueness of Dan Brown's evidence, saying, "He has presented himself as being a deep and thorough researcher...evidence in this case demonstrates that as regards DVC that is simply not correct with respect to historical lectures" and that "the reality of his research is that it is superficial."

The judge also included a code in his judgment. Throughout the judgment, apparently random letters are italicised and these form the message. The letters in the first paragraphs spell smithy code and the rest appear as follows "jaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv". This was subsequently decoded to read "Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought", referring to the British admiral whom Judge Smith admires. As with the book, this secret message made use of Fibonacci numbers for its encoding.