Lies, Damned Lies and Random House Footnotes
I'm trying really hard to get past page five of Random House's April 22, 2005 filing and on to the rest of the pages, but it is truly difficult because nearly every sentence has something that is false, distorted or out of context like the bachelor thing in the last post.
Take, for example, footnote 3, page five of Random House's April 22, 2005 filing, makes the following ludicrously incorrect and provably false statement: "Perdue repeatedly refers to the 'remarkably similar hero and heroine' in both novels...yet notably never explains any real similarities between Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu from Da Vinci Code and Seth and Zoe Ridgeway from Daughter. To the contrary ...the characters have almost no, let alone "remarkable" similarities.
What on God's green Earth does Random House think this legal filing is about (starting on page 40) or this section (starting on page 3) from John Olsson's report?
Denying that something exists doesn't make it go away.
Take, for example, footnote 3, page five of Random House's April 22, 2005 filing, makes the following ludicrously incorrect and provably false statement: "Perdue repeatedly refers to the 'remarkably similar hero and heroine' in both novels...yet notably never explains any real similarities between Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu from Da Vinci Code and Seth and Zoe Ridgeway from Daughter. To the contrary ...the characters have almost no, let alone "remarkable" similarities.
What on God's green Earth does Random House think this legal filing is about (starting on page 40) or this section (starting on page 3) from John Olsson's report?
Denying that something exists doesn't make it go away.
posted by Lewis Perdue at 12:21 PM
8 Comments:
Sadly, denying something exists CAN make it go away.
Without launching into a political polemnic, here in the UK our Prime Minister, a lawyer, does it all the time.
Under no circumstances whatsoever will a lawyer concede any point that damages his case, however valid. Why should he? He would only be making life easier for you.
Twisted logic from a twisted profession ...
Well, I for one, am damned sick of how Random House likes to play fast and loose with facts, truth, reality etc.
I'm interested in what's considered common facts. How much of the template can an author use? Is changing the names enough?
Changing the name is definitely not enough.
The Random House request for declaratory judgement and the earlier fax from Ms. Trager both attempt to characterize the similarities between my characters and Mr. Brown's as unprotected and try to do so by isolating each of the elements in a character, taking them OUT of context then explaining away each one, one by one, as an unprotected idea.
The Second Circuit unequivocally rejected this flawed reasoning in Warner II: "However, we do not accept defendants' mode of analysis whereby every skill the two characters share is dismissed as an idea rather than a protected form of expression. That approach risks elimination of any copyright protection for a character, unless the allegedly infringing character looks and behaves exactly like the original. A character is an aggregation of the particular talents and traits his creator selected for him. That each one may be an idea does not diminish the expressive aspect of the combination."
In addition, the characters Mr. Brown copied from me are well enough developed in specifically identical ways to make their similarities apparent and unmistakably copied. Mr. Justice Learned Hand offered a lesson for plagiarists who copy specific details when he said, "the less developed the characters, the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly. "Nichols, 45 F.2d at 121.
As just ONE of MANY examples: DVC's Langdon and DoG's Seth both are mentioned as mildly claustrophobic ... but this plays NO role in ANYthing either character does.
FYI -- that sort of "quirk" is something that writers will seed/foreshadow throughout a book with the idea that a scene will turn on the use of it. During the editing stage, most or all of those are cut IF they don't play a role ... the claustrophobia could be used as a way for the character to overcome a limitation ... and to create a doubt in the reader's mind that it will be overcome.
I should have edited it out of DVL, but didn't. Why is it in DVC? I know that Langdon had this characteristic in Angels & Demons, but there is much in that work that also infringes mine.
That's what I was thinking about A&D. It was written simultaneously with yours.
actually, the precise similarities are present with The Linz Testament (1985), a book which I re-wrote for Daughter of God. Hero in that was Derek Steele ... nothing at all changed about him for Seth in Daughter of God.
Thus, those quirks and identicalities pre-date A&D ... and some of the stuff in Linz, which I took out for DoG made it into A&D.
There's no question the characters are identical in all but name, but the locations are different, and that codex in a codex thing. That's a different twist although a Dr.Suess recollection would come up with that.
Those citations are chapters.
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