Monday, March 06, 2006
BAIGENT & LEIGH VS. BROWN
An interesting revelation from the trial over TDVC:
Such was the weight on the shoulders of John Baldwin QC, defending Brown and Random House. So having heard the claimants' case - that Brown looted 15 core ideas from Baigent and Leigh's 1982 work The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail - he attempted to turn the tables. Was it possible that Baigent and Leigh's own ideas were not in fact original, but culled from sources already in the public domain? One such source, he asserted, was the Bible itself. Another - old but not quite that old - was The Observer
Baldwin told the court the theory that Jesus was married had first been aired in an article in this newspaper in 1971. He added: 'We say the claim relies on and seeks to monopolise ideas at such a high level of generality they are not protected by copyright.'
The article cited appeared on the front of The Observer's Review section 35 years ago, under the headline: 'Charles Davis asks: Was Jesus Married?' Davis had been Britain's leading Roman Catholic theologian, who left the priesthood and church in 1966 and married the following year. By 1971 he was professor of religion at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, and ready to break another taboo.
Read the whole article here.
