Robert Anton Wilson Observes It All Serenely

I first mentioned Lewis Perdue's lawsuit against Dan Brown back in March. Last week, he filed his latest response and counterclaims against Brown, Random House, and Columbia Pictures. You can read the summary or the whole darn PDF file. While I suspect Perdue's got a pretty good shot at some portion of the $150 million he's asking for, although you should keep in mind I'm no lawyer, I rather doubt he'll have much luck "[e]njoining any further publication, distribution, or sale of Code." And when he suggests "Defendant is also entitled to have all existing copies of Code (in whatever form or format) seized and destroyed," well, that's clearly just a bargaining chip, but a pretty silly one if you ask me...and I don't even have a copy of The DaVinci Code to pry out of my cold, dead hands.

Tangentially, I followed the links to an article about Perdue's "forensic linguist," John Olsson, which detailed his belief that Richard Condon plagiarized passages from I, Claudius in The Manchurian Candidate. "Doubtless a serious research effort would yield hundreds more of these sources for Condon's book," Olsson said, "but in the end it is surely not worth doing." Throw $150 million into the mix, though, and there's a powerful motivation for crunching the letters, as it were...