'Code' Lawsuit Good For Business

The authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," plaintiffs Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, have seen sales of their book zoom during the Dav Vinci Code trial. The somewhat tasteless joke circulating among journalists outside London’s High Court goes like this: Did you hear about the planeful of vacationers that crashed on the way back from the islands? Investigators have already recovered 37 copies of the "Da Vinci Code." Inside court or out, no one’s challenging the fact that the Dan Brown best-seller has been, well — popular. Some even claim that it’s primarily the phenomenal, 40-million-copy success of the book — and not its arcane, crypto-historical theories about Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, French royal bloodlines and secret societies — that’s really the impetus for the lawsuit claiming infringement of copyright. [More]