A judge ruled Friday that mega-selling author Dan Brown did not steal ideas for “The Da Vinci Code” from a nonfiction work, ending the suspense about the case with an ultimately unsurprising decision.
High Court Judge Peter Smith rejected a copyright infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,” who claimed that Brown’s blockbuster “appropriated the architecture” of their 1982 book. In the United States, the book is titled, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”
