Aurlog

I’m a bit slow off the mark on this one, I know, but the code hidden by the judge (Mr Justice Smith) in the recent Dan Brown trial has been solved (via Rashbre Central). According to the judge as reported by the BBC the mistake in the code was intentional:

Mr Justice Smith said a typographical error had been added deliberately to ‘create further confusion’

The BBC reports that the judge of the recent Dan Brown/Holy Blood Holy Grail (HBHG) plaigarism trial apparently left his own code in the judgement on the case. There are letters in italics which seem to spell out some words. Good stuff. He has apparently agreed to confirm it if anyone cracks it.

This makes sense of why the judgement took so long to come out. Interestingly I noticed that the judgement also admits that he had read HBHG several times over the last twenty years. Oh dear.

The Da Vinci Code trial ended last Friday with the judge finding in favour of Mr Brown. I think this was the only realistic verdict. As George MacDonald Fraser said in the Telegraph at the weekend:

They’ve got to lose that case … If they win it’s going to make writing historical fiction very difficult. Anyway, as I understand it, there’s no copyright in ideas.

However, it would have been far more entertaining had the the verdict gone the other way. I don’t know quite how these things work, whether it would have come down to enormous damages or cessation of Da The Vinci Code’s sale, but it would certainly have thrown a spanner in the works of the forthcoming film (tagline Seek the truth). As it is, the conspiracy of the Templars (the Temple in London is still linked to the law in England!), masons (everyone knows all judges are masons!), and the Priory of Sion (a secret society, which is why they weren’t overtly connected to the trial, although they surely must have been!) won after all and Baigent and Leigh are effectively ruined. Anyway, there is a trailer for the film on Google Video. I have my suspicions the film will be better than the book.

Aside from the news page linked above, the BBC offer a number of interesting pages on the trial:

• Extracts from the judge’s ruling, including the following, which contradicts the assumption that the case was won on the idea that a novel can’t be found to infringe the copyright of a ‘history’ book: There is nothing for example in this case, which if decided in the claimants’ favour, would stultify creative endeavour, obtain a monopoly on ideas or historical information or create a precedent which extends the boundaries of copyright protection in sphere of literary works. The complete text of the ruling is available and I intend to try and at least skim through it if I get the chance.
• Reactions of the protagonists to the verdict, including the following quote from Richard Leigh: I think by its very nature, this case entailed a conflict between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. We lost on the letter of the law, I think we won on the spirit of the law, and to that extent we feel vindicated. No, you lost, and I can’t see how the judge’s ruling in any way vindicated the plaintiffs. As I said above, I mean to give the ruling more of a read. If I can be bothered.
• Would you buy a second-hand car from one of these?. That’s not what the story says, of course, but it does give pictures, and does beg the question. If I had to purchase a second-hand Ford Escort from any of them, I have to admit I would go for Dan Brown, providing his wife didn’t do the research on the car’s history. I would have serious reservations about approaching Richard Leigh on a dark night. I’m sure they’re all lovely really.

Roll on the film this Christmas on ITV!

An alleged librarian has demostrated his thorough training and professional skills with the following review of Da The Vinci Code, as found by The Da Vinci Hoax weblog on a bookseller’s website:

Brandon Vanover (firekiller814@hotmail.com), a Librarian, March 20, 2006,
Get over it
The Da Vinci code was a work of fiction, which means it WASN’T MEANT TO BE REAL. Dan Brown is an excelent writer who had an idea and wrote on it. Just like any excelent writers out there. Most of the anti Da Vinci Code fanatics are just christians with a grudge and need to realize that the bible is also a book and cant be proved to be entirely factual either. I dont understand why people have to complain about fictional books, their not real

Mr Vanover (must be an anagram) and the rest of us will have to wait, probably till Easter, to hear the result of Mr Brown’s trial. I can’t imagine the judge summarising any more concisely than that.

Earlier today I came across The Da Vinci Crock, a weblog detailing the progress of the Dan Holy Vinci case. (Be careful accessing the site, using Mozilla at least, as a highly annoying pop-up pops us trying to elicit money for the Hurricane Katrina appeal and flickers annoyingly). I wondered what beef the author had to go in it into such detail until I researched the author, Lewis Perdue, whom, I must admit, I had never heard of, and found that, as reported by the BBC:

In August [2005], Mr Brown won a court ruling against another writer, Lewis Perdue, who claimed The Da Vinci Code copied elements of two of his novels, Daughter of God and The Da Vinci Legacy.

Mr Perdue had sought $150m (�84m) in damages and asked the court to block distribution of the book and the movie adaptation, currently in production.

I later found, in true Baigent and Leigh researching style, that the Crock was started in April 2005 with the intention

to provide as complete a resource as possible for the many well-documented books, articles and blogs that have likewise detected the bull offal essence of the Code. Prodigious quantities of this essence has been detected.

I notice that my own reference to the Crock in relation to Mr Brown’s oeuvre marginally postdates Mr Perdue’s weblog. I can honestly say that I have never read anything by Mr Perdue and only one thing by Mr Brown. I intend to keep it this way, although I will follow the Crock with interest.