'Da Vinci' Author Wins Court Fight

Judge Rejects Copyright-Infringement Claim Over Best-Selling Thriller

(CBS/AP) 
"We never believed it should have come to court and frequently tried to explain why to the claimants," said Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random House Ltd.

Leigh, however, was defiant.

"We lost on the letter of the law. I think we won on the spirit of the law. To that extent we feel vindicated," he said outside the court without elaborating.

Smith refused the plaintiffs permission to appeal and ordered Baigent and Leigh to pay 85 percent of Random House's legal costs, which lawyers said could top $1.75 million. He ordered the plaintiffs to make an interim payment of $600,000 by the end of the month.

Brown's victory was widely anticipated by lawyers because copyright protects the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself.

"There is no copyright in ideas," said Mark Stephens, a lawyer specializing in media law and copyright issues. "It's just about how words are expressed."

"If the verdict were in favor of the plaintiffs, the judge (would) have rewritten the law of copyright," Stephens said.

The case drew a packed crowd of journalists, Brown fans and theological revisionists to London's neo-Gothic High Court last month.

Smith retained an air of good humor during sometimes esoteric hearings that touched on the Roman Emperor Constantine's deathbed conversion to Christianity, the founding of the medieval warrior order the Knights Templar, the Merovingian dynasty allegedly descended from Jesus, and the perfidy of a seventh-century official named Pepin the Fat.

The publicity-shy Brown traveled from New Hampshire to testify on behalf of his publisher, and spent three days on the stand.

Brown acknowledged that he and his wife, Blythe, read "Holy Blood" while researching "Da Vinci," but said they also used 38 other books and hundreds of documents, and that the British authors' book was not crucial to their work.

Baigent and Leigh claimed Brown's novel contains the same central themes as their book. But under cross-examination, Baigent conceded that it had been an exaggeration to say that Brown used "all the same historical conjecture" as their book.

Random House lawyer John Baldwin said that while many of the incidents in "The Da Vinci Code" had been described before, "no one has put them together, and developed and expressed them, in the way Mr. Brown did. That is why he has a best-seller."

Thanks to the case, so do Baigent and Leigh. Their 24-year-old book is selling 7,000 copies a week in Britain, compared with a few hundred before the case began. Baigent's new book, "The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History," has an initial print run of 150,000 copies in the United States.

Their book is published by Random House.