It was no big surprise this week when a UK judge rejected charges of copyright infringement against DaVinci Code author Dan Brown. But the ruling could have a wide impact on the publishing industry, codifying for the first time some set of rules for authors of fiction who choose to base their work on fact. Or could it? “To suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far… The key issue is the amount of a book, both in quantity and quality, which is copied by someone else.”