I had completely forgotten about this Da Vinci Code lawsuit until yesterday. The best quote from the lawsuit is "Fortunately I was told by both parties that there was no significant point of law involved in this case to trouble me. ... My initial feeling on the statements of both Counsel was [beware Greeks bearing gifts]" (paragraphs 137 and 138).

Attorneys work really hard to tell judges that their case is a clear-cut issue, nothing new, just like these other cases right here. So it's common to say that there is "no significant point of law" to be concerned with, and then spend pages and pages discussing those laws.

This lawsuit covered a book written as a "historical conjecture" that included a lot of false information that ended up in the Da Vinci Code. Apparently, in the 1950s, a frenchman decided to play a little game, and invented a hoax (and forged supporting "historic documents") regarding an organization called the "Priory of Sion." Holy Blood, Holy Grail was written based largely on that hoax. Dan Brown wrote the Da Vinci Code, on "historical research" and came to the same conclusions, although in this lawsuit he claimed he didn't know about Holy Blood, Holy Grail until he was halfway done writing his book. Oops.

Sounds a lot like Feist where a phone book company was accused of copying another phone book because "1,309 of the 46,878 listings in Feist's 1983 directory were identical to listings in Rural's 1982-1983 white pages. ... Four of these were fictitious listings that Rural had inserted into its directory to detect copying." Feist is important in the US because it got rid of the "sweat of the brow" idea of copyright (that is, you get copyright in anything that takes a lot of work; under current US law, you only get copyright in things that require some creativity). Apparently, "sweat of the brow" exists to some extent in the UK ("A work 'need only be "original" in the limited sense that the author originated it by his efforts ...' One looks at the labour expended in achieving the relevant work. Copyright is designed to protect a person from others taking the fruits of his labour and thus short circuiting the work that they must put in to it" [paragraph 143]).

A funnier case of something similar can be found here.