TWO authors who claimed that Dan Brown had stolen their ideas for his blockbusting novel were facing a £2 million legal bill last night after failing to crack The Da Vinci Code.

Neither Michael Baigent nor Richard Leigh were in court yesterday to hear Mr Justice Peter Smith hand down a 71-page reserved judgment comprehensively dismissing their claim for infringement of copyright of their 1982 book, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, by Random House.

After sitting through every day of the three-week trial at the High Court Brown was back home in New Hampshire, having had 24 hours’ notice that the assault on his spectacularly successful money-spinner had failed. He issued a statement that the claim had been “utterly without merit”.

But Brown, who has earned an estimated £250 million since his novel of preposterous intrigue based on the theory that the descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene are still alive, did not escape censure. The judge rejected his claim, made during three days of increasingly uncomfortable cross-examination, that he had not consulted HBHG until a late stage in the writing of DVC, as the book titles became known during the hearing.

The claimants were refused leave to appeal after the judge, who has coloured the proceedings with dry northern humour, commented that it was “a great pity” they were not in court and suggested to their counsel, Jonathan Rayner James, QC, that he did not even know where they were.

On the contrary, counsel said; Baigent, who was also given advance notice of the judgment, was touring the US and Canada.

To a courtroom overflowing with reporters and conspiracy theory groupies, the judge read out a summary of his conclusions in six minutes. He then spent another hour listening to counsel for both sides pleading for their money. The claimants’ own legal costs are around £800,000, but the judge ruled that they need, in addition, pay only 85 per cent of the defence’s £1.2 million costs, as at least 40 of the 3,000 documents they had been obliged to read had proved irrelevant.

The even worse news for the claimants is that they are required to make a £350,000 interim payment by May 5.

In his ruling the judge said that HBHG did not have a “central theme”, which was the principal plank in the claimants’ case, in which they tried to identify 15 specific points that had been lifted by Brown. That, said the judge, was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation.

“HBHG has much more to it than the central themes so expressed, so that the claimants’ contention that HBHG has very little apart from the central themes is not correct. Even if the central themes were copied they are too general or of too low a level of abstraction to be capable of protection by copyright law.”

He said these central themes were “merely a selective number of facts and ideas artificially taken out of HBHG for the purpose of litigation”.

There was no “architecture” or “structure” to be found in HBHG as had been contended by Baigent and Leigh, and Dan Brown had not infringed any such architecture or structure, or substantially copied HBHG when writing DVC, although it was clear that the former book had been used to write limited passages of DVC.

But the judge did uphold the claims that there had been some copying of HBHG’s language by Brown. However, this was not claimed to be textual infringement of the copyright in HBHG.

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