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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4574720" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think that this is the most relevant point, because it doesn't establish what you are contending, namely, that word-for-word copying is a necessary element of infringement. It was not because of the absence of word-for-word copying that the case was lost.I haven't read the judgement (I'm not a copyright lawyer) but a quick Google brought up this <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4888954.stm" target="_blank">BBC report and discussion</a>. The following paragraphs are particularly relevant:Since there is no copyright in an idea, any claim for breach of copyright must rest on the way that the idea is expressed. In this case, it was described as the "architecture" or "structure" of the work, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The plaintiffs claimed that this structure - the central theme - had been lifted by Dan Brown for the Da Vinci Code. The judge rejected this claim even though he said that Brown had copied some language from the earlier book. But to suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far. The judge himself acknowledged that nothing in the plaintiffs' case would have stultified creative endeavour or extended the boundaries of copyright protection. In launching their claim, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, were aware of a similar High Court case brought in 1980 by an author called Ravenscroft, who wrote a non-fiction work titled The Spear of Destiny. Co-incidentally, it also had Christ's fate as its central theme. Ravenscroft argued successfully that the novelist, James Herbert, had infringed his copyright by using the same characters, incidents and interpretation of events in parts of his thriller, The Spear. But, as copyright lawyer, David Hooper, points out, the key issue is the amount of a book, both in quantity and quality, which is copied by someone else.US law obviously differs from the law of the UK and other Commonwealth countries, but to the best of my knowledge it does not differ in this particular respect.This is not a very accurate description of how judicial decision-making in superior courts works in the Anglo-Australian-Candadian-New Zealand legal systems.</blockquote>

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