Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

So did you hear about this guy Richard Leigh who was suing Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, claiming that Mr. Brown copied elements of an earlier non-fiction book?

If not, you should know that it was a ludicrous lawsuit to the begin with. It was a non-fiction book that Mr. Brown used for some source material in writing his fiction novel! The guy didn't have a chance under any interpretation of copyright law. Clearly, (to me, anyway,) he was filing the lawsuit with the hope one or both of two things would happen:

1) Dan Brown and Random House would settle the lawsuit, thus paying Mr. Leigh a ridiculous sum of money to go away.

2) Mr Leigh's book would receive lots of publicity, thus selling more copies.

#2 kinda happened. It's estimated that almost 30,000 copies of the guy's book have been sold since the whole thing hit the media.

As for #1, Well, the lawsuit is over, and Mr. Leigh is SCREEEEEWWED!

The judge not only ruled in favor of Dan Brown (of course!), but also ordered Mr. Leigh to pay 85% of Dan Brown and Random House's court costs! That's 1.1 MILLION Pounds! (Suit was filed in the UK) And that's not even including Mr. Leigh's own court costs of around 800,000 pounds!

Wow. He completely brought it on himself. This is one of the most spectacularly awful missteps I've ever heard of. That's what he gets for filing a lawsuit complaining that a bestselling novel used information from your non-fiction book, which isn't even illegal! What an idiot!

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