Significant cases

Baigent v Random House Group

The claimant authors appealed against the decision of Peter Smith J rejecting their claim for copyright infringement.  The claimants were the authors of a book entitled The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail from which it was claimed Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown had copied material for his best-selling novel.  The claim had been rejected on the basis that only ideas of a high level of abstraction had been copied.  The Court of Appeal agreed, finding that the claim was really about the copying of ideas, not protectable under copyright law, rather than the expression of those ideas.