Daffodil Lane

I can't wait to see the movie! I loved the book.

By 'Neo-Christian' do you mean, new Christian? Or non-Christian? Or something else?

I am a Christian am not squirming in my seat. I think that people should read the Da Vinci Code, but they should also remember that it's an idea, not necessarily the truth or fact. In fact, I hope it encourages people to read the Bible and decide for themself what the truth is.

On another note, there is also a suit going on about the author, Dan Brown, misusing ideas from 'The Holy Blood Holy Grail' for his book. He said that his wife read Holy Blood and took notes for him before he wrote Da Vinci, but that he didn't misuse the material.

According to MSNBC.com, "James said his case was not attempting to 'stultify creative endeavor,' or to claim a monopoly on ideas or historical debate, but to prove that Brown had 'relied heavily' on the earlier work, published in Britain in 1982 and the following year in the United States."

Brown also references Holy Blood in his book. So my question is, if he referenced the other book, how could he have broken copyright on the other book?

From the looks of it, Holy Blood hasn't suffered any major losses. In fact, the book is now on the top 10 best seller list, so it's given the Holy Blood useful PR. According to U.S. copyright law, Da Vinci would have to have seriously compromised the major points of the book and therefore consumers would have lost purpose in purchasing the book (because they got the information from Da Vinci and that Brown didn't request permission from the Holy Blood). But I'm not sure how it works in British law...

In an interesting twist, both books are from the same publisher...lol.

I just finished reading this from my textbook, 'The Law of Public Communication' by Kent R. Middleton and William E. Lee, "Copyright protects expression but not the ideas or the facts contained in the expression. A writer has a copyright in a story about the Presidential election but not in the idea of writing such a story or the facts within it. Others are free to write a similar story using the same facts, provided that these authors use their own language, style, and sequencing. In other words, writers can borrow the facts and ideas of others but not the way the original writer expressed them."

So, by U.S. law, I think that Brown didn't break copyright. However, British law could be very different.

And if you are wondering if I just broke copyright by quoting my textbook, no, I haven't. I'm a student and have rights of fair use. Plus I am not using it for commercial purposes.

Remember our law came from British law, so the differences are that big in the grand scheme of things. The then to avoid our tendency to over legislate for corporate campaign contributors so their laws are simpler and more straight forward. To be honest, I personally think this is all a publicity stunt orchestrated by the publisher to get both books in the news for a long period of time. Think about it, it's great advertising for the movie as well. I mean people are staying up at night worried if they movie will get released at all.

Now fair use in this country is completely under attack by the Republican party and their corrupt allies in the copyright holders. The DMCA was designed to make sure that there was a steadily closing noose around the neck of fair use in hopes of stealing that fundamental right guaranteed to Americans. So the day is not that far away that reference a text book with proper notation will require you to pay the author student or not. And the Republican party will be extremely happy about it. And the quality of our educations will rapidly decrease since we will have to pay to read and reference the most modern thought. It's probably going to be worse than the dark ages, just like the Republican party dreams of. Stagnation and ignorance running rampant.

Neo-Christian is a word I made up to explain what I was seeing going on in the radical right wing religious circles. The blogosphere has different names for it, in Crashing the Gates, Markos refers to them as Theo-cons. My basic definition is a "religious point of view characterized by a return to fundamentalist principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism." Here's the link to where I defined Neo-Christian and what I mean when I say Neo-con from a few years ago when I was first asked to define it. Basically we are all grasping for a word to describe the fake Christian movement most made up by Evangelicals and radicals from many other denominations that support the Republican party without question in hopes of establishing America as a cheap third world Theocracy. Most of these kind of people hate America, our freedoms (ie. freedom of religion), and the American way of life (ie. tolerance). Another common term for them is the American Taliban. They are basically the new version of the Christian Identity movement and the radical hate group known as the Republican party is their political wing.