The DaVinci Trial: Threats of Litigation (Part 1)

"On April 11, Lewis Perdue sat on a bench in a gallery on the 17th floor of Manhattan's Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse and did his best to contain himself. Before him, a panel of judges from the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit debated his future. As Perdue's lawyer launched into a tortuous and somewhat odd explanation to the court about how, as a science-fiction buff, he was a big fan of Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, Perdue tried in vain to suppress a sigh. Then he began to rock back and forth." ~ Vanity Fair, July 2006

A Real-Life Tale of Litigation:

In 2003, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code took the publishing world by storm, shot to the top of the bestseller list, and didn't leave for a very long time. Also in 2003, a man named Lewis Purdue picked up a copy just like everyone else and dove into the story of the Illuminati and the Holy Grail.

Lewis was . . .  appalled; he had seen the story before. He knew every character. He knew the plot. As he should have – it was all from a book he wrote in 2000, Daughter of God.

The Da Vinci Code quickly became the bestselling novel of the 21st century. Lewis wrote a letter to Brown's publisher - Doubleday - almost meekly asking for an acknowledgment that Brown had lifted the plot from him. Doubleday's law firm responded with a demeaning, patronizing letter that not only dismissed him but offered to send him case law so Lewis 'could educate' himself.

That sent Lewis off to find lawyers of his own around the same time Tom Hanks was announced as the lead for the movie version.

Finding a Lawyer

Lewis somehow convinced a law firm near his California home to take his case on a contingency basis. They found a professor at UCLA, an expert on libel, copyright, and intellectual property to conduct an in-depth analysis of both books and concluded,

With that in their arsenal, Lewis' law firm issued a cease-and-desist order to Ron Howard and his production team just as they were about to start filming. They announced they were 'getting' ready to sue.

Pre-litigation Errors

Big mistake. Doubleday and Brown rushed to a federal court in New York to ask for an injunction and thereby moving jurisdiction to New York for good. Lewis had to get a new law firm thousands of miles from his home. Meanwhile, Brown was also being sued in London by another set of authors for stealing their idea. And, several more claims also popped up though none were pursued in the courts. One of those authors put the matter succinctly, "The feeling I got, and what I've heard from a lot of people in the community, was that [Brown] was a kind of literary vacuum cleaner: he went through the literature and stuff got sucked up and blended together into a kind a mélange."

These other matters fueled Lewis, who somewhere along the line became completely and utterly fixated on his case . . . to the point where he stopped writing or, in fact, doing anything constructive while he waited for justice. Brown won the London case, but not without taking some real hits to his reputation and vaulting the other writers' book, written in 1982, back on the bestsellers list.

Out of the London case came this: John Olsson, the director of Britain's Forensic Linguistics Institute, took it upon himself to also review Lewis’s book and wrote, "This is the most blatant example of in-your-face plagiarism I've ever seen. There are literally hundreds of parallels."

At this point, Lewis was openly telling his friends and family that he was about to win the lawsuit against Brown and "then everything he has is mine."

What His Lawyer Didn’t Tell Him

Apparently, his hopes and faith in his case ran unchecked by his lawyer, the one who was only going to get paid if Lewis won. Also, the one who had quite obviously never read either book. The one who appealed to the Second Circuit and talked about his favorite sci-fi book.

Of course, he also never warned Lewis about the near impossibility of his suit. That historical fact and theories are not protected by copyright law. Nor, really, is a plot line that incorporates bits and pieces of ancient conspiracy theories and the best of Coast to Coast AM.

He also, most assuredly, did not warn Lewis that the expert testimony was basically worthless in a matter where "case law maintains that an average lay reader and not an expert should determine the standard for copyright infringement." Nor had he explained that they would, eventually, have to show how Brown's book impacted the sales of Lewis' book.

He was headed to court without ever advising his client about a single reality.