By now, you've probably heard that the new Vanity Fair questions Dan Brown's originality, as Seth Mnookin looks at the court battle Brown faced against Lewis Perdue, who claimed that The Da Vinci Code ripped off his own novel, Daughter of God. Mnookin's outsider perspective sheds a clear light on the legal firepower imbalances that left very little opportunity for Perdue to prevail, even as it addresses evidence of Brown's alleged literary pilfering that was excluded from the legal proceedings because it was too smart—or, as in the case of thriller writer David Morrell, because the potential swipee didn't feel like making a federal case out of it.

What does that evidence suggest? Let's put it this way: If Kaavya Viswanathan had tried ripping off academic journals and obscure writers who barely made it onto the midlist instead of recognizable bestsellers, we might have been looking at an Opal Mehta movie come 2009. (Of course, we should mention in all fairness that the academic material might well indeed be covered under fair use, as Doubleday is said to claim.) Mnookin also points out, as well he should, that both Perdue and Brown owe a huge debt to Holy Blood, Holy Grail; in particular, he raises important questions about Brown's claim that he didn't discover that book until late in the research process for Da Vinci Code.

PW Daily gets instant feedback from Random House, in the form of a statement from Suzanne Herz: "The verdicts in favor of Dan Brown, in two United States Federal Courts and the British High Court of Justice, speak for themselves... Those opinions carry a lot more weight than those of Mr. Mnookin and Mr. Perdue." So there.